Jessica Stern

writer, lecturer, public policy, Harvard

Jessica Stern is a Lecturer in Public Policy and a faculty affiliate of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. She is a member of the Hoover Institution Task Force on National Security and Law and holds a doctorate in Public Policy from Harvard. From 1994–1995, she served as Director for Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council, where she was responsible for national security policy toward Russia and the former Soviet states and for policies to reduce the threat of nuclear smuggling and terrorism. From 1998–1999, she was the Superterrorism Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and from 1995–1996, she was a national Fellow at Hoover Institution at Stanford University. She is the author of the *New York Times* Notable Book *Terror in the Name of God and The Ultimate Terrorists*, as well as numerous articles on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. A 2009-2010 Guggenheim Fellow, she was selected by *Time magazine* in 2001 as one of the seven thinkers whose innovative ideas “will change the world.” In her latest work, *Denial: A Memoir of Terror*, Stern investigates her own unsolved adolescent sexual assault at the hands of a serial rapist, and in so doing, examines the horrors of trauma and denial. Naomi Wolf calls Denial “one of the most important books I have read in a decade… brave, life-changing, and as gripping as a thriller, this should be required reading for anyone seeking to understand terrorism and anyone who has survived trauma of any kind… A tour de force.”