Patrice McMahon, Ph.D.

Patrice McMahon is currently a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow, advising the Secretary General at the Community of Democracies in Warsaw, Poland. She received her PhD from Columbia University in New York; her MA from The George Washington University, and her BA from The American University both in Washington, DC. She is a two-time Fulbright Research Fellow and Professor of Political Science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in the U.S. where she has won numerous awards for teaching excellence, including the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Graduate Education (2012); the Outstanding Educator of the Year Award (2009-10);  the “best class at UNL,” (2007); and the Arts and Science College Distinguished Teaching Award (2005).  From 2018-2021 she was the CAS Dean’s Professor of Teaching and Learning. She was also Director of the Honors College for six years, Director of Global Engagement, Director of Global Studies and Graduate Chair, Political Science at University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

McMahon has spent her career delving into the complexities and contradictions of humanitarianism, civil society activism, democratization, and transnational politics. Her scholarly contributions include co-editing Activism in Hard Times in Central and Eastern Europe: People Power, a collaboration between activists and academics; writing The NGO Game: Post-Conflict Peacebuilding in the Balkans and Beyond (Cornell University Press); seven other book projects; and many articles and policy reports. Her research has appeared in various publications, including Foreign Affairs, Political Science Quarterly, Human Rights Quarterly, Democratization, and Ethnopolitics and has been supported by the American Council for Learned Societies (ACLS), the U.S. Department of State, the National Research Council, the National Council for East European and Eurasian Research (NCEER), the Soros Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the Polish Science Foundation. McMahon now leads The Ordinary People Project, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), which explores grassroots Polish responses to the Ukrainian refugee crisis. At the Bellagio Center, McMahon will reflect on the evolving nature of compassion and care, the future of humanitarianism, and the transformative role of grassroots action in addressing the needs of refugees and forced migrants.