Lisa Anderson was appointed President of The American University in Cairo in January 2011. Anderson served as the University’s Provost from 2008 to 2010.  

Prior to joining AUC in 2008, Anderson served as the James T. Shotwell Professor of International Relations at Columbia University and is the former Dean of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia. She also served as the Chair of the Political Science Department at the University and as the Director of Columbia’s Middle East Institute. Before joining Columbia, she was Assistant Professor of Government and Social Studies at Harvard University. 

Anderson is the author of Pursuing Truth, Exercising Power: Social Science and Public Policy in the Twenty-first Century (Columbia University Press, 2003), The State and Social Transformation in Tunisia and Libya, 1830-1980 (Princeton University Press, 1986), editor of Transitions to Democracy (Columbia University Press, 1999) and co-editor of The Origins of Arab Nationalism (Columbia 1991).

Anderson holds a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and an M.A. in Law and Diplomacy from the Fletcher School at Tufts University. She earned a Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University, 1981, where she also received a certificate from the Middle East Institute. She was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Laws from Monmouth University in 2002.