Peter Wehner, vice president and senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., has been named the Pamela and Jack Egan Visiting Professor at the Duke University Sanford School of Public Policy and the Trinity College of Arts and Sciences for the 2019-2020 academic year.
Wehner is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, covering American politics and conservative thought, and a contributing writer for The Atlantic. He has written for many other publications, including Time, National Review, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, writing on issues of politics, religion and national security. He is a frequent news commentator, having appeared on MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, PBS and C-SPAN.
His most recent book, The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump, was published in June 2019 by HarperCollins.
Wehner served in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. In the George W. Bush administration, he was deputy director of speechwriting, and in 2002, he became the head of the Office of Strategic Initiatives, generating policy ideas and providing counsel on domestic and international campaigns.
At Duke this fall, Wehner will take part in the “Provost’s Forum: Immigration in a Divided World” Oct. 16-17. He will be on the panel “Options for a Fragile World: Immigrants and Refugees in the U.S. and Europe,” and will lead a break-out session with New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff.
The DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy, POLIS and the Program on American Grand Strategy, within the Sanford School of Public Policy, will collaborate with Wehner to plan events for the spring, including student workshops and lectures.
Wehner is a graduate of the University of Washington and lives in McLean, Va., with his wife Cindy. They have three children.
The Egan Visiting Professorship is awarded to a journalist, writer or commentator of appropriate distinction in a field related to media and contemporary issues. Wehner is the third writer to hold the Egan Visiting Professorship. Bloomberg columnist Megan McArdle was the second in 2017-2019, and Washington Post op-ed columnist Michael Gerson was the first in 2015.