William J. Antholis

William J. Antholis is a nonresident senior fellow in Governance Studies at Brookings. He also serves as the director and CEO of the Miller Center, a nonpartisan affiliate of the University of Virginia that specializes in presidential scholarship, public policy, and political history.

He served as managing director at Brookings from 2004 to 2014. In that capacity, he worked directly with Brookings’s president and vice presidents to help manage the full range of policy studies, develop new initiatives, coordinate research across programs, strengthen the policy impact of Brookings research, and ensure the quality and independence of that research. On behalf of Brookings’s president, he also worked directly with Brookings board of trustees and a range of university, philanthropic, and other institutional partners.

He was a resident senior fellow in Governance Studies, where his work focused on the politics and institutions of international diplomacy. He is the author of the book: “Inside Out India and China: Local Politics Go Global”. It explores how country-sized provinces and states in the world’s two biggest nations are increasingly becoming global players.

Along with Brookings President Strobe Talbott, he is the author of “Fast Forward: Ethics and Politics in the Age of Global Warming” (Brookings Press, 2010). He has published articles, book chapters and opinion pieces on U.S. politics, U.S. foreign policy, international organizations, the G8, climate change, and trade. From 1995 to 1999, Antholis served in government. At the White House, he was director of international economic affairs on the staff of the National Security Council and National Economic Council, where he served as the chief staff person for the G8 Summits in 1997 and 1998. He also was deputy director of the White House Climate Change policy team. At the State Department, he served at the Policy Planning Staff and in the Economic Affairs Bureau. Prior to joining Brookings, he served for five years as director of studies and senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund, a U.S. grant-making and public policy institution devoted to strengthening transatlantic cooperation. In that capacity, Antholis was project director of the Trade and Poverty Forum, a six-country dialogue of leading citizens and legislators focused on using the global economy to address persistent global poverty and inequality. He was also an international affairs fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations and a visiting fellow at the Center of International Studies at Princeton University. In 1991, Antholis co-founded the Civic Education Project – a nonprofit organization that supported western-trained social science instructors at universities in 23 Central and Eastern European countries. He served on its board of trustees until 2007, when it was absorbed by the Central Eastern European University. He earned his Ph.D. from Yale University in politics (1993), and his B.A. from the University of Virginia in government and foreign affairs (1986).