Press contact: Donna Urschel (202) 707-1639
Public contact: Yvonne French (202) 707-7678

July 15, 2011 (REVISED August 2, 2011)

Alexander Evans Named Henry Alfred Kissinger Scholar

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington has appointed Alexander Evans, a counselor in the British diplomatic service, as the Henry Alfred Kissinger Scholar in Foreign Policy and International Relations in the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress.

At the Library, from July 2011 to January 2012, Evans will research Pakistan’s strategic culture and how it shapes U.S. foreign policy goals. His research will also focus on the U.S.-Pakistan bilateral relationship.

Evans is the 11th scholar to occupy the Kissinger chair. The position was created in 2000 through the generosity of friends of Kissinger to honor the former secretary of state and to emphasize the importance of foreign affairs.

Evans was most recently a senior adviser to the late Ambassador Richard Holbrooke and then to Ambassador Marc Grossman, the U.S. special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan. A career member of the British diplomatic service since 2003, Evans has served in Pakistan, India and in the Policy Planning Staff. He is a visiting senior research fellow at King’s College London, and has previously held fellowships at Yale University and Nuffield College at the University of Oxford. He has published widely on South Asia, international security and the nature of policy advice.

Prior to joining the diplomatic service, Evans held a series of positions in British think tanks, including Policy Exchange, Chatham House, the Center for the Study of Financial Innovation and the Adam Smith Institute. He also worked in Afghanistan for the United Nations in early 2002. Evans was appointed an officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2010.

The Kissinger Chair program offers outstanding thinkers and practitioners a unique opportunity to pursue advanced research in the largest and most international collection of library materials in the world. Previous chair-holders were Aaron Friedberg, Klaus Larres, Lanxin Xiang, Melvyn Leffler, James Goldgeier, Charles Kupchan, William R. Smyser, Teresita Schaffer, C. Raja Mohan and Benjamin Fordham.

Through a generous endowment from John W. Kluge, the Library of Congress established the Kluge Center in 2000 to bring together the world’s best thinkers to stimulate and energize one another to distill wisdom from the Library’s rich resources and to interact with policymakers in Washington. For more information about the Kluge Center; visit www.loc.gov/kluge/.

# # #

PR 11-134
07/15/11
ISSN 0731-3527

Back to top