Dr. P.H. Liotta is Executive Director of the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy and Professor of Humanities, Salve Regina University, Newport, Rhode Island. He is responsible for setting the vision, leading and implementing programs that reflect U.S. Senator Claiborne DeBorda Pell's decades of public service: enhancing international dialogue to achieve a more peaceful world and preparing individuals for a more informed and active role in local, national, and world affairs.
Prior to assuming directorship of the Pell Center in 2004, Dr. Liotta served as the endowed Jerome E. Levy Chair of Economic Geography and National Security at the U.S. Naval War College. He served for two decades in the U.S. Air Force and piloted the T-38, KC-135, UV-18, C-12 and (with the Hellenic Air Force) the Mirage 2000. He also served as Fulbright lecturer and poet-in-residence (Slobodan umjetnik, 1988-1989) in the former Yugoslavia. He has travelled widely throughout the former Soviet Union, particularly the Caucasus and Central Asia--to the Altai region of Siberia, Tajikistan, the Afghan front, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Georgia and Iran.
He is the author of seventeen books and numerous articles in fields as diverse as poetry, criticism, education, international security, intervention ethics, foreign policy analysis, and has published a novel about Iran. Recent works include Dismembering the State: The Death of Yugoslavia and Why it Matters; The Uncertain Certainty: Human Security, Environmental Change, and the Future Euro-Mediterranean; Mapping Macedonia: Idea and Identity (co-authored with C.R. Jebb); and the co-edited Security and Environment in the Mediterranean: Conceptualising Security and Environmental Conflict.