SALVEtoday Archives
23-Aug-04
DR. PETER LIOTTA BEGINS TENURE AS PELL CENTER DIRECTOR
By Public Affairs Staff
Dr. Peter Liotta began his tenure as the new director of the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy Aug. 16.
Dr. Liotta is the second director of the Pell Center, which was established at Salve Regina by an Act of Congress in 1996. He succeeds Dr. Richard Nuccio, who left in spring 2003 to become the director of international programs for the Center For Civic Education in Calabasas, Calif. Pell Center Senior Fellow Alberto R. Coll had been serving as the Pell Center's interim director.
In his role as Pell Center director, Dr. Liotta intends to balance attention to international relations and domestic policies by, among other things, establishing a wider network of Pell Center associations. His approach to public service and citizenship, advanced through teaching and creative writing, has been viewed as unique by many of his colleagues from a wide array of creative and scholarly disciplines.
Dr. Liotta is the first-ever graduate of Providence's Moses Brown Society of Friends Preparatory School to go on to a military academy. He earned a bachelor's degree in humanities from the United States Air Force Academy in 1978. He has a master's degree in communication from the University of Oklahoma, a master's degree in English literature from Cornell University and a master's degree in national security and strategic studies with "highest distinction" from the Naval War College. He also has a master of fine arts degree in creative writing and translation from Cornell and a Ph.D. in humanities from Salve Regina.
A former Fulbright Scholar and writer-in-residence to the former Yugoslavia, he has taught courses in foreign policy, international relations and future force planning at the Naval War College, where he served as course director for "What's Wrong with This Picture? A Cultural Geography of Former Yugoslavia." During his United States Air Force career, he flew the Mirage 2000 (with the Hellenic Air Force), C-12, UV-18, T-38, and KC-135 aircraft.
Dr. Liotta has received a Pulitzer Prize nomination, a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship, two Fulbright scholarships, the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America and the International Quarterly Crossing Boundaries Award. His work has been translated into Arabic, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Farsi, French, Greek, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Macedonian, Portuguese, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish and Turkish.
Dr. Liotta has authored 15 books and numerous articles in fields as diverse as poetry, criticism, education, international security, intervention ethics, and foreign policy analysis, as well as having written a novel about Iran.
His research interests include the study of geography and geopolitics (particularly in Southwest Europe, the Euro-Mediterranean, and Central and South Asia) as well the re- examination of security issues in the contemporary environment. An elected member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, he serves on the advisory boards of Estudios de Defensa del Instituto de Ciencia Política de la Pontificia Universidad Católica, Santiago de Chile, the Research Institute for European and American Studies in Athens, Greece, and the Scientific Advisory Board of the European Peace Research and Security Studies (AFES-PRESS) Foundation in Mosbach, Germany.
Raised in Australia before coming to Rhode Island, he has also lived in Iran and traveled to more than 100 countries and to every continent. He has worked as a military pilot, university professor (in the fields of literature, poetry, national security affairs, and international relations), naturalist and field worker in the preservation of the endangered Peregrine falcon, diplomat, and foreign policy analyst and adviser.