CPD Faculty Fellow Appointed Executive Director of the U.S. Advisory Commission on PD

The USC Center on Public Diplomacy congratulates CPD Faculty Fellow Vivian S. Walker on her appointment as Executive Director of the United States Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy at the U.S. Department of State. In this role, she will lead the charge to appraise “U.S. Government activities intended to understand, inform and influence foreign publics and to increase the understanding of, and support for, these same activities.”

Walker established herself in public diplomacy as a practitioner through 26 years as a U.S. Foreign Service Officer—rising to the rank of Minister Counselor—and taking on tours in Croatia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Tunisia and more. Following, she transitioned her public diplomacy knowledge to academia and became a CPD Faculty Fellow.

At CPD, Walker has disseminated public diplomacy insights by teaching at CPD Mini-Courses and CPD Summer Institutes, serving as Guest Editor of CPD Perspectives since 2018, authoring her own issues of CPD Perspectives: “The Floating Tree: Crafting Resilient State Narratives in Post-Truth Environments” (2017); “The Reem Island Ghost: Framing State Narratives on Terror” (2016);“ and “Benghazi: Managing the Message” (2015); and writing a series of CPD Blog posts about disinformation campaigns actively happening in Eastern Europe.

“Vivian is an extremely valuable member of the public diplomacy community,” says CPD Director Jay Wang. “We wish her the best at the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy and look forward to our continued collaboration on today’s most pressing public diplomacy issues.”

For more on Vivian S. Walker’s public diplomacy research and accomplishments, check out CPD’s “In the Works” features of her work in 2016 and 2019.