The New America Foundation, a centrist think tank, has appointed Ted Widmer, director of the John Carter Brown Library, as a senior research fellow in its foreign policy division.
The appointment will not take Widmer away from Brown, and his role at the University will remain unchanged. "I'm basically a kind of virtual fellow," he said. "I communicate with other fellows, but I don't expect to be in Washington a great deal. After all, we all know Providence is the center of the universe."
Though he grew up near campus, Widmer returned to Brown in 2006 after working as a speechwriter for President Bill Clinton and, later, directing Washington College's C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience. He most recently published a compilation of American presidential speeches and is an affiliated scholar at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank.
"Everyone knows I'm a Democrat, but I like talking to people with different points of view - it makes life a lot more exciting," Widmer said, adding that he thinks the New America Foundation is "unusually open-minded."
"They are doing very original work, matching surprising speakers and researchers to each other. They're always looking at issues with fresh eyes," he said.
The New American Foundation seeks to bring "new ideas to the fore of our nation's public discourse," according to its mission statement.
Widmer's work for the foundation will concentrate on the history of American foreign policy, which is also the focus of his forthcoming book, "Ark of the Liberties: America and the World." The book, he said, is an intellectual history of Americans' understanding of their place in the global political universe.
"It's not every treaty and every military action, but much more a history of how we have thought about how we fit in," he said.
Widmer expects to present the book and his research both at Brown and the New America Foundation.
Steve Clemons, of the New American Foundation, said Widmer will be writing and speaking about U.S. foreign policy for the foundation's American Strategy Program, which Clemons directs. "He is one of the nation's leading historians on the legacy of early American political thought on U.S. foreign policy," Clemons said.
