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Aronson Associate Professorship

Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences

Established in 2017 by Jeff and Shari Aronson

JEFFREY H. ARONSON is co-founder and managing principal of Centerbridge Partners, L.P., a private investment firm based in New York City with approximately $25 billion of capital under management. The firm is focused on private equity, distressed securities and credit investing. Mr. Aronson has been an active investor in distressed securities for 25 years and has been deeply involved in many U.S. and overseas restructurings. Prior to co-founding Centerbridge with Mark T. Gallogly in October 2005, Mr. Aronson was a partner at Angelo, Gordon & Co., where he led all of the firm’s distressed securities and leveraged loan efforts. Before joining Angelo, Gordon in 1989, Mr. Aronson served as senior corporate counsel at L.F. Rothschild & Co. and he began his career as a securities attorney with the law firm of Stroock & Stroock & Lavan.

Mr. Aronson is chair of the Johns Hopkins Board of Trustees. In addition, he serves as a member of the Krieger School Dean’s Advisory Board and the Center for Financial Economics Advisory Board. He also is a member of the Johns Hopkins Medicine Board and its Executive Committee. Mr. Aronson graduated with honors from Johns Hopkins University in 1980. He has a JD from New York University School of Law and serves as a member of their Board of Trustees. His daughters Marni and Nicole graduated from Johns Hopkins as members of the class of 2013 and 2015, respectively. He is married to Shari Aronson.

In 2015, Mrs. and Mrs. Aronson established the Aronson Center for International Studies, designed to promote closer ties between the university’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. The center will include two professors who will teach students and collaborate with faculty in both schools. It also will oversee funding for undergraduates who want to do research or study abroad, including at SAIS’s international campuses in Europe and China.

Held by Adria Lawrence

ADRIA LAWRENCE is the Aronson Distinguished Associate Professor of International Studies and Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. She holds a PhD in political science from the University of Chicago, and a BA in International Studies from Vassar College.

Lawrence is a scholar of Middle Eastern and North African Politics. She studies colonialism, nationalism, conflict, and collective action. Her book, Imperial Rule and the Politics of Nationalism: Anti-Colonial Protest in the French Empire (Cambridge University Press 2013), has received multiple awards, including the 2015 David Greenstone Book Prize, given by the American Political Science Association’s Politics and History Section, the 2015 L. Carl Brown Book Prize, given by the American Institute for Maghrib Studies (AIMS), and the 2014 Jervis-Schroeder Best Book Award, given by the American Political Science Association’s Organized Section on International History and Politics. It was named one of the best books of 2013 on Foreign Policy’s Middle East Channel.

Lawrence has also investigated the use of violent and peaceful tactics by nationalist movements. Her articles on this topic have appeared in International Security, as well as in Rethinking Violence: States and Non State Actors in Conflict (co-edited with Erica Chenoweth, MIT Press, 2010).

Her current research examines protest during the Arab Spring. Her recent article in the British Journal of Political Science shows how past experiences of regime repression shape the willingness of people to initiate protest against an authoritarian regime. She is also writing a book on colonial state formation, which investigates the tactics used by the British and French to establish their empires in Africa and the Middle East.

Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS), the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School, the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Program, and the American Institute for Maghrib Studies.