CFR Welcomes Visiting Fellows

CFR Welcomes Visiting Fellows

September 8, 2020 3:49 pm (EST)

News Releases

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) welcomes the 2020–21 visiting fellows to the David Rockefeller Studies Program. Selected fellows have the opportunity to broaden their perspective of foreign affairs through a year in residence at the Council.


Visiting fellowships are an integral part of the Council’s efforts to develop talent by supporting more scholar-practitioners in the field of foreign policy. The International Affairs Fellowship (IAF), established in 1967, counts more than six hundred alumni. Over the years, the Council has hosted more than 150 Military Fellows and more than seventy Edward R. Murrow Press Fellows. Among CFR’s Military Fellowship alumni, who come to the Council at the captain or colonel rank, more than half have gone on to be promoted to admiral or general.

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EDWARD R. MURROW PRESS FELLOW

Célestine Bohlen is a contributor to the New York Times, and has been a foreign correspondent for the Washington Post, New York Times, and Bloomberg News. She has been posted to Moscow three times—in the 1980s during the rise of former President of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev for the Washington Post, and twice in the 1990s for the New York Times, concluding with the rise of Russian President Vladimir Putin. She was also a New York Times correspondent in Budapest, Hungary as well as Rome, and an international affairs columnist in Paris until 2016. She was a fellow at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School in 2014. She has been teaching journalism at Sciences Po in Paris since 2011. Her work at CFR will concentrate on the “frozen conflicts” in the former Soviet Union, and the consequences of their ambiguous status.


MILITARY FELLOW
Colonel Jon A. Eberlan, of the U.S. Air Force, was most recently commander of the 75th Air Base Wing at Hill Air Force Base in Utah, providing installation support for the Ogden Air Logistics Complex, two fighter wings, and fifty other associate units; totaling twenty-four thousand members consisting of active duty, civilian and contractor personnel. Eberlan enlisted in the Air Force in 1990 and earned his commission as a distinguished graduate of Officer Training School. Eberlan has served as a group commander, squadron commander, and squadron operations officer. He has also performed staff duties at the Major Command, Air Staff, and Joint Levels. He served as commander of the 309th Aircraft Maintenance Group, also at Hill Air Force Base.

MILITARY FELLOW
Colonel Walker M. Field, of the U.S. Marine Corps, was most recently chief of staff of the Marine Forces Reserve, which includes 38,500 reserve Marines and 62,000 members of the Individual Ready Reserve. He is the recipient of the Defense Superior Service Medal; Legion of Merit, Meritorious Service Medal (four times); Navy Commendation Medal (three times, one with valor); Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal; and Combat Action Ribbon.


MILITARY FELLOW
Colonel Mark G. Kappelmann, of the U.S. Army, most recently commanded the Army Aviation Brigade at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, and the Special Mission Wing Special Operations Advisory Group in Kabul, Afghanistan. He is a master Army aviator with more than three thousand flight hours in various rotary and fixed wing aircraft. Kappelmann has commanded at the company, battalion, and brigade levels. His assignments include positions of responsibility in support of larger conventional and special operations mission sets across multiple joint commands. He has been stationed in Germany and the Republic of Korea, and has deployed in support of contingency operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq.


MILITARY FELLOW
Captain Robert C. Francis Jr., of the U.S. Navy, commanded U.S. Navy Destroyer USS Lassen, making multiple patrols to the East and South China Sea. He has also served in multiple aircraft carriers and guided missile frigates conducting counter narcotics, counter piracy, and freedom of navigation operations, and supported multiple Operation Enduring and Iraqi Freedom missions. His staff assignments include military assistant to the assistant secretary of defense Indo-Pacific security affairs, and the assistant readiness officer on the Commander Naval Surface Forces of the U.S. Pacific Fleet staff.

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MILITARY FELLOW
Captain John “Jay” C. Vann, of the U.S. Coast Guard, is an operations specialist and Coast Guard “cutterman.” Vann is a human resources, training, and education expert, having commanded the Coast Guard’s largest training center at Yorktown, Virginia, and most recently served as assistant superintendent at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy. He has commanded the Coast Guard cutters Assateague and Harriet Lane, and has conducted several deployments in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans aboard five Coast Guard cutters. His staff assignments include duty on the Coast Guard Academy faculty, as the Coast Guard e-learning program manager, support and special staff assignment officer, and both chief of cutter forces and future operations at U.S. Coast Guard Atlantic area.


STANTON NUCLEAR SECURITY FELLOW
Brian D. Blankenship is an assistant professor in the department of political science at the University of Miami, where he researches and teaches on topics related to international security, international cooperation, and U.S. foreign policy. Blankenship’s research specializes in the politics of military alliances. His forthcoming book project studies the conditions under which the United States reassures its allies and the conditions under which its assurances of protection come at the expense of allied burden sharing. In related projects, he studies the effectiveness of U.S. signals of alliance reassurance and their role in U.S. nonproliferation policy, bargaining between the United States and host countries over military access, and states’ ability to use economic versus security tools of foreign policy to attract and influence partners. Previously, Blankenship was a postdoctoral fellow at Dartmouth College’s John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding and a summer fellow at the RAND Corporation. He holds a BA in political science and history from Indiana University and a PhD in political science from Columbia University.


STANTON NUCLEAR SECURITY FELLOW
Reverend Brian K. Muzás is an assistant professor at Seton Hall University’s (SHU) School of Diplomacy and International Relations, and director of the Center for UN and Global Governance Studies. Muzás was ordained a Catholic priest in 2003. That year, he also taught computer science and international relations at SHU and worked in the nongovernmental organization (NGO) community at the United Nations, eventually serving two terms as secretary of the NGO executive committee and as co-chair of numerous NGO annual conference subcommittees. Muzás received a BSE in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton University; an MS in aeronautics from the California Institute of Technology, where he was a National Science Foundation Fellow; an MDiv in pastoral ministry, an MA in systematic theology, and two John Paul II Medals for academic accomplishment from Immaculate Conception Seminary at SHU; and a PhD from the Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ) School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He received a Harrington Doctoral Fellowship at LBJ, where he researched state leaders, religions, and nuclear weapons.

Learn more about CFR’s fellowship program at https://www.cfr.org/fellowships.

To request an interview with a CFR expert, please contact the Global Communications and Media Relations team at 212.434.9888 or [email protected].

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