Stacie Goddard

Stacie Goddard is Director of the Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia SIPA and will hold the Arnold A. Saltzman Professorship starting in July 2026.

Goddard served as the Betty Freyhof Johnson ’44 Professor of Political Science and Associate Provost for Wellesley in the World at Wellesley College, where she has taught since 2005. Her research and teaching focus on great power competition, with particular attention to the global politics of legitimacy and revisionist powers. She is also a Faculty Affiliate with the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University and formerly served as faculty director of the Madeleine Korbel Albright Institute for Global Affairs at Wellesley.

Her most recent book, When Right Makes Might: Rising Powers and the Challenge to World Order (Cornell University Press, 2018), examines how a rising power’s legitimation strategy shapes whether great powers accommodate or confront a potential challenger. Her first book, Indivisible Territory and the Politics of Legitimacy: Jerusalem and Northern Ireland(Cambridge University Press, 2010), explores how narratives of legitimacy are used to secure contested territory. A third book, Dynamics of Power Politics, coauthored with Paul MacDonald and Daniel Nexon, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2027. Her articles have appeared in International Security, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, and other leading journals, and her public writing has been published in Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.

She has held fellowships at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University, the Security Studies Program at MIT, and the Center for Advanced Studies at Ludwig Maximilian University Munich, among others. She earned a BA from the University of Chicago and a PhD in political science from Columbia University.

Education

• PhD in Political Science, Columbia University
• AB, University of Chicago

Honors & Awards

• Fellow, Center for Advanced Studies, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, 2019
• Fellow, Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford University, 2021