Will Quinn, Deputy Director and Research Fellow

Will Quinn is the Deputy Director of the Ax:son Johnson Institute for Statecraft and Diplomacy (AJI), where he leads strategic planning, coordination, and program development. Based at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs, he is currently completing a dissertation on U.S.-Russian relations in early decades of the twentieth century and their impact on the development of American foreign policy.

Prior to beginning his doctoral research, Will served as a Professional Staff Member on the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee for Chairman John McCain where he conducted oversight and wrote legislation shaping Department of Defense policy on the Middle East, the Western Hemisphere, security cooperation, and homeland defense, among other subjects. Before joining the committee in 2015, he worked in strategic communications for the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, a non-profit organization focused on the U.S. federal budget and economic policy.

Will has contributed research to several recent books, including Niall Ferguson’s Kissinger: The Idealist, 1923-1968 (2015), Eliot Cohen’s The Big Stick: The Limits of Soft Power and the Necessity of Military Force (2017), and Francis J. Gavin’s Nuclear Weapons and American Grand Strategy (2020), and has worked as a Summer Associate and Adjunct Researcher at the RAND Corporation on subjects including fighting on nuclear battlefields, Sino-Indian military rivalry, and congressional oversight of the Intelligence Community.

At SAIS, he teaches a regular professional skills course on briefing and has taught courses on intelligence with Professor John McLaughlin and Shakespeare and politics with Professor Eliot Cohen. Mr. Quinn holds an M.A. in International Relations with a concentration in Strategic Studies from SAIS and an A.B. in History from Harvard College.