Rebecca Turkington

I am a Gates Cambridge Scholar and PhD candidate at Clare Hall College studying transnational women’s organizing in the mid-20th century. My dissertation research focuses on inter-communal women’s groups in colonial Tunisia, and their relationships with global left feminist networks.

Prior to Cambridge, I was Assistant Director of the Women and Foreign Policy Program at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, DC, and a founding staff member of the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security where I led the gender and countering violent extremism portfolio and co-authored flagship reports on women’s participation in peace processes and transitional justice. I previously worked on global women’s political participation at the National Democratic Institute and Women in Public Service Project. I have a MA in Security Studies from Georgetown University, concentrating in terrorism and substate violence, and a BA in International Relations and History from Wellesley College where I was a Madeleine K. Albright fellow. I was a 2019 Penn Kemble Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy, a 2020 fellow of the Schmidt Futures International Strategy Forum, and a member of the 2022 cohort of Foreign Policy for America's NextGen Initiative. My writing on gender, security, and foreign policy has been published in Foreign Affairs, The New Republic, Foreign Policy, The West Point Sentinel, War on the Rocks, Defense One, OpenDemocracy, Ms. Magazine, and the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, and I sit on the editorial board of Studies in Conflict & Terrorism. I also have many years of part-time experience in the museum world, including as a museum assistant at the Phillips Collection and Davis Museum, and as DC chair of Wellesley Friends of Art.