Leslie Vinjamuri

About Dr. Leslie Vinjamuri

Dr. Leslie Vinjamuri is the president and CEO of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. She joined the Council in 2025 from the Royal Institute of International Affairs, known as Chatham House, in London, where she served as director of the US and the Americas program and previously as dean of the Queen Elizabeth II Academy for Leadership in International Affairs.

Dr. Vinjamuri has published widely on the United States, geopolitics, international order, multilateralism, and human rights. She has led international research teams of high-level experts on critical issues of geopolitics, international order, and the Global South, and built partnerships across multiple geographies. Select publications include "Why Multilateralism Still Matters: The Right Way to Win Over the Global South" (Foreign Affairs, 2023) and Human Rights Futures (with Jack Snyder and Stephen Hopgood, Cambridge University Press, 2017). She is also editor and a contributing author of "Competing Visions of International Order: Responses to US Power in a Fracturing World" (Chatham House, 2025) and "Anchoring the World: International Order in the Twenty-First Century" (Foreign Affairs, 2021). In 2022, she led a multi-year initiative supported by The Rockefeller Foundation that resulted in the publication of "Building Global Prosperity: Proposals for Sustainable Growth," which features contributions from Lord Mark Malloch-Brown, Lord Jim O'Neill, and the Rt. Hon. Helen Clark. 

Dr. Vinjamuri has spent more than two decades teaching graduate and undergraduate courses on international order, human rights, and US foreign policy. She is professor of practice in international relations and diplomacy at SOAS University of London, where she previously served as professor of international relations (tenured); founding co-director and then director of the Centre on Conflict, Rights and Justice; and co-chair of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy. Previously, she worked in the Asia Bureau at USAID and at the Congressional Research Service (CRS), and was a member of the academic tenure-track faculty at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. She has held fellowships at Harvard University and the London School of Economics.

Dr. Vinjamuri is vice chair of the board of trustees of the Carnegie Council for Ethics and International Affairs. She serves on the advisory boards of the Princeton University project on Reimagining World Order, the London School of Economic's Phelan United States Centre, and LSE IDEAS. She has also served as a Marshall Commissioner since 2019. 

Dr. Vinjamuri received a BA from Wesleyan University (Phi Beta Kappa), an MSc (distinction) from the London School of Economics, and a PhD from Columbia University. She is a regular contributor to international broadcast media, including CNN, Bloomberg, and the BBC. She is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

For media inquiries, interview requests, or to invite Dr. Vinjamuri for speaking engagements, please contact communications@globalaffairs.org.