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Expert Bio
Catherine Powell is an adjunct senior fellow for women and foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). She is a part of both the women and foreign policy and digital and cyberspace policy programs at CFR. She is also a professor at Fordham University School of Law, where she teaches constitutional law, civil rights and civil liberties in a digital age, human rights, and feminist theory. Additionally, she is currently a visiting fellow with the Yale Information Society Project. Her prior experience includes stints in former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's policy planning office and in the White House National Security Council as director for human rights in the Barack Obama administration. Previously, Powell was founding director of the Human Rights Institute and the Human Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School, where she was on the faculty as a clinical professor.
Powell currently is a member of the American Journal of International Law (AJIL) board of editors; is a vice president of the American Society of International Law (ASIL); and is a co-chair of Blacks in the American Society of International Law (BASIL). In addition to formerly serving on the Human Rights Watch board, she has been a consultant on national security and human rights matters for the Center for American Progress and the American Constitution Society as well as a visiting professor at Georgetown University Law Center (between 2012 and 2013) and Columbia Law School (spring 2007 and fall 2016).
She is a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School, where she was a senior editor on the Yale Law Journal. She has a master’s degree in public affairs from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. After her graduate work, she was a post-graduate Ford fellow in teaching international law at Harvard Law School and then clerked for Judge Leonard B. Sand on the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York.
Powell’s recent blogs and op-eds include “Gender and Power in an Age of Disinformation: a Conversation With Mary Anne Franks,” “Can You Hear Me? Speech and Power in the Global Digital Town Square,” for Women Around the World (2022), “Invisible Workers on the Global Assembly Line: Behind the Screen” in Women Around the World and cross-posted in Balkinization and Net Politics (2019), “The United Divided States: San Francisco Sues Donald Trump for Sanctuary Cities Order” in Just Security (2017), “How #MeToo Has Spread Like Wildfire” in Newsweek (2017), and “How Women Could Save the World” in the Nation (2017).
Her recent academic publications include “Color of COVID and Gender of COVID: Essential Workers, Not Disposable People,” in Yale Journal of Law and Feminism (2020), “Race, Gender, and Nation in an Age of Shifting Borders: The Unstable Prisms of Motherhood and Masculinity,” in UCLA Journal of International Law and Foreign Affairs (2019), “We the People: These United Divided States” in Cardozo Law Review (2019), “How Women Could Save the World, If Only We Would Let Them: From Gender Essentialism to Inclusive Security” in Yale Journal of Law and Feminism (2017), and “Gender Indicators as Global Governance: Not Your Father's World Bank” in the Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law (2016). Shorter essays include “Race and Rights in the Digital Age” in AJIL Unbound (2018).
Affiliations:
- Fordham Law School, professor of law
- Yale Information Society Project, visiting fellow
- Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, visiting scholar
- Reiss Center on Law and Security, non-resident fellow
- American Journal of International Law, board of editors
- American Society of International Law, vice president
- Blacks in the American Society of International Law, co-chair
Current Projects
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In recent years, activists in global social movements such as #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, and #BringBackOurGirls have harnessed social media to raise awareness of injustice and counter prevailing narratives. How has Twitter reshaped activism and to what extent has the platform empowered marginalized groups to achieve political victories? Brooke Foucault Welles, associate professor at Northeastern University and coauthor of the book #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice, and Meighan Stone, adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and coauthor of the book Awakening: #MeToo and the Global Fight for Women's Rights, to discuss the role of Twitter in modern social justice movements in the United States and abroad, including the implications for race and gender equality.
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Working for low wages and few benefits, a large but invisible workforce keeps the internet running. Through her research, Mary L. Gray sheds light on the workers—many of them women caring for young children and elders—who support the technology industry and the lack of regulations governing their labor. Mary L. Gray, senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research, 2020 MacArthur fellow, and coauthor of the book Ghost Work, discusses what governments and the technology industry can do to address this emerging fault line of inequality.
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The international debate on prostitution and sex trafficking continues as COVID-19 spreads, with the United Nations warning that the pandemic has exacerbated the many risks to those harmed in the sex industry. Our speaker Catharine A. MacKinnon, Elizabeth A. Long professor of law at the University of Michigan and James Barr Ames visiting professor of law at Harvard Law School, discusses this debate under current conditions and in the long term.
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Experts discuss the increasing occurrence and involvement of female suicide bombers and supporters of terrorist extremist groups across the globe.
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Experts discuss the United Nations' Women, Peace, and Security agenda.
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Short Description: Catherine Powell hosts a discussion with UN Women’s Nahla Valji on the landmark UN Security Council resolution recognizing the role of women in peace and security matters and the U.S. role in implementing it.
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Following the release of her report on the status of women in Afghanistan, Catherine Powell moderates a discussion with Open Society Foundations' Rachel Reid and the U.S. Department of Defense's David Sedney on the role the United States can play in extending the progress of Afghan in women in education, the economy, health care, and beyond.
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