Audrey Kurth Cronin came to the U.S. National War College from Oxford University (Nuffield College), where she was Director of Studies for the Oxford/Leverhulme Program on the Changing Character of War. A member of the war college faculty in Washington, DC since July 2007, she also continues as a non-residential Senior Research Associate at Oxford. Before that, Dr. Cronin was Specialist in Terrorism at the U.S. Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, where she advised Members in the aftermath of 9/11. She has taught at numerous other universities including Columbia, the University of Maryland and Georgetown, where her long-standing graduate course on terrorism was featured in the New York Times shortly after 9/11. In addition to her academic expertise, she has served periodically in the U.S. government, including positions in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Office of the Secretary of the Navy, and the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. She regularly consults with agencies in both the Executive and Legislative branches.

Dr. Cronin completed the book How Terrorism Ends while on the faculty at Oxford. She also wrote Ending Terrorism:A Strategy for Defeating Al-Qaeda, a policy-oriented Adelphi Paper (monograph) published by the International Institute for Strategic Studies in April 2008. She has a longstanding interest in the question of how conflicts end and wrote her first book on the negotiations over Austria following the Second World War (Great Power Politics and the Struggle over Austria, 1945-1955). Other recent publications include “How Al-Qaida Ends,” International Security (Summer 2006); “Cybermobilization: The New Levee en Masse,” Parameters (Summer 2006); “Behind the Curve: Globalization and International Terrorism,” International Security (Winter 2002/2003); and “Rethinking Sovereignty: American Strategy in the Age of Terrorism,” Survival (Summer 2002). Major studies for Congress include Designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations (2004), and Al Qaeda after the Iraq Conflict (2003), and Terrorists and Suicide Attacks (2003). She also lately produced Attacking Terrorism: Elements of a Grand Strategy (Georgetown University Press, 2004), an edited volume that examines the full range of policy instruments for effective counterterrorism.

Dr. Cronin graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University and held a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University. She was a Marshall Scholar at Oxford University, where she captained the first women’s rowing team for St. Antony’s College.