SIS Welcomes New Faculty
American University’s School of International Service (SIS) is honored to welcome several new full-time faculty members for the 2025-2026 school year. Each faculty member is an expert in their field and brings extensive research and practical experience to the classroom.
Among the new faculty, members of the SIS community may recognize a familiar face as a current member of our faculty is promoted to tenure-line. Additionally, SIS welcomes our latest SIS Changemaker Postdoctoral Fellows. These positions are for emerging scholars working on transformational research designed to address pressing contemporary problems in international affairs, such as social cohesion, climate change, humanitarian crises, and social inequality within and across nations.
Get to know our newest faculty members and learn more about their interests and recent research.
Suzanne Freeman joins the SIS faculty as a Changemaker Postdoctoral Fellow. She researches civil-intelligence relations, nuclear issues, and grand strategy, working in the dual context of international relations and comparative politics. Methodologically, she focuses on archival research, structured interviews, and wargaming. Freeman’s book project, anchored in her work on Russia and the Soviet Union, examines the strategies that authoritarian intelligence agencies employ to intervene in their own state’s foreign policy decision-making process about the use of force. Her broader research agenda examines the impact of coercive institutions on domestic and foreign policy in authoritarian states. She has received fellowships and awards including a pre-doctoral fellowship at George ƹƵ University’s Institute for Security and Conflict Studies at the Elliot School of International Relations and a Smith Richardson Foundation World Politics and Statecraft Fellowship. Her peer-reviewed research has been published inPS: Political Science & Politics. She will receive her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s political science department in the summer of 2025.
Thayer Hastings also joins as a Changemaker Postdoctoral Fellow. Hastings is a cultural anthropologist working on questions raised by the political traditions of sovereignty and anticolonialism in the Middle East.He received his PhD from the City University of New York Graduate Center in 2025.His dissertation ethnographically and historically documented the onerous bureaucratic requirements Israel imposes on Palestinians to prove that they inhabit Jerusalem, the city they stake indigenous and national claims to. The research addresses how crises of and within settler colonialism shape and take shape in everyday life, as well as the analytical openings revealed by attending to spaces of intimacy, relationships, and the home. His research has been recognized with fellowships and awards from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Palestinian American Research Center,and the American Anthropological Association Middle East Section.
Nicholas R. Micinski joins the Department of Peace, Human Rights, and Cultural Relations (PHRCR) as an assistant professor. Micinski's research focuses on the global governance of migration, the political economy of aid, development, climate displacement, the United Nations, the EU, and human rights. He is the author of three books:Delegating Responsibility: International Cooperation on Migration in the European Union;UN Global Compacts: Governing Migrants and Refugees; and the forthcomingAiding Autocrats: Migration Management, Governance, and Repression in Africa(co-authored with Kelsey Norman). Micinski was previously assistant professor at the University of Maine, and postdoctoral fellow at Université Laval and Boston University.
Tazreena Sajjad has been teaching in the PHRCR Department and previously in the Global Governance, Politics and Security (GGPS) program for 13 years. Her research focuses on refugees and forcible displacement, the securitization and criminalization of migration, and border violence. Her other areas of interest include transitional justice and “post-conflict” transitions. Tazreena's most recent publications include “Hierarchies of Compassion: Ukrainian Refugees and the U.S. Response” in the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs; “Once We Were Refugees: Security, Solidarity and a View from the Global South” in the Journal of Refugee Studies; and “Strategic Cruelty: Legitimizing Violence in the European Union's Border Regime” in Global Studies Quarterly. Her current research examines the politics of Rohingya reception in Bangladesh, for which she received the 2024 Migration Politics Fellowship at the University of Glasgow. Her other research project examines the role of humiliation in border violence.
Tereza Varejkova joins the Department of Politics, Governance, and Economics (PGE) as an assistant professor. She holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Maryland, College Park. Prior to that, she earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Sciences Po Paris and worked on impact evaluations of development programs in West Africa as a research manager at the Center for Evaluation and Development (C4ED) within the University of Mannheim. She is an applied microeconomist with research interests at the intersection of development and environmental economics. More specifically, her research spans two main areas. First, she focuses on the issues of water scarcity, natural resource management, and sustainable farming practices in sub-Saharan Africa. Second, her research investigates how populations respond to natural disasters.
Polina Beliakovawill join SIS in academic year 2025-26 as an assistant professor in the Department of Foreign Policy & Global Security. She currently is a postdoctoral research fellow at the MIT Security Studies Program, where her work addresses Russian foreign and security policy. Her broader scholarship focuses on civil-military relations and the use of force, with regional expertise in Russia, Ukraine, and Israel. She received her PhD in international relations from the Fletcher School at Tufts University, and held a postdoctoral appointment at Dartmouth College's Dickey Center for International Understanding. Being a native Ukrainian and Russian speaker, she collects data through elite interviews, fieldwork, archival research, and systematic review of local media sources using quantitative and qualitative approaches for data analysis. Her book project,Know Thy Military: How Governmental Policies Weaken Civilian Control, highlights the understudied effects of governmental decisions about the use of force on the erosion of civilian control in the states with historically coup-averse militaries. The empirical chapters build on evidence from Russia, Ukraine, Israel, and the UK. Polina's work has been published byComparative Political Studies,Texas National Security Review,Perspectives on Terrorism,Foreign Affairs,War on the Rocks,POLITICO, and theƹƵ Post. Her expertise on the Russian defense sector, Ukraine's security sector governance, and Russia's post-Cold War use of force informed projects by the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, Transparency International, and the World Peace Foundation, among others.