Jo-Anne Hart is a full professor of Global Studies in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and teaches in the Graduate School of Education at Lesley University. She is also an adjunct professor at the Watson Institute of international and public affairs, Brown University.
She graduated with her BA from UCLA and received a fellowship to study Persian language at New York University (NYU), where she earned a PhD in Political Science, specializing in international relations. In addition to Lesley, she has taught at Brown, the Naval War College in Newport, RI, and Barnard College / Columbia University. Professor Hart also completed her MFA in Creative Writing at Lesley in early 2019.
Hart also works as a practitioner in international conflict resolution: she is active with the international peacemaking NGO Search for Common Ground. Hart is a founding member of a US-Iranian working group on avoiding incidents at sea in the Persian Gulf and she regularly participates in trainings with the US Army on mutual threat reduction. She has been invited on multiple occasions to the NYC / UN dinner Iranian presidents hold for American experts. She debated John Bolton live on national TV. Hart has years of experience in security decision making exercises at the national level and is a regular visiting expert on conflict mediation at the Army’s Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. The US Navy flew her out to an aircraft carrier at sea, with an “arrested landing” (tailhook), to discuss avoiding war with Iran with the senior battle group command. She lectures widely in the US and abroad, including Kuwait, Copenhagen, Moscow, Heidelberg, and Tehran. Her work has been translated into Arabic, Persian, Spanish, Portuguese, Urdu, French, Welsh, and an Indonesian language.
At Lesley, Hart teaches global interdisciplinary studies, contemporary Middle East, and Civics Education.