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Roger A. Meece |
The U.S. Department of State has announced
that Florida International University will receive an ambassador
in residence for the academic
year 2003-04.
Roger A. Meece, currently U.S.
ambassador to the African country of Malawi, will be the second
diplomat in residence with FIU’s
Department of International Relations. He succeeds the State
Department’s
Sheldon Austin, who was recently named cultural attaché at
the United States Embassy in Paris after having served at FIU
over the past two years.
Ralph S. Clem, director of the Center for Transnational and
Comparative Studies, which will host Ambassador Meece, said
that this prestigious
appointment underscores the quality of the International
Relations program and speaks to the maturation of FIU
as a major research
university.
“With only a handful of
these awards made each year to top universities, the fact that
this Department was able to secure two in a row is
dramatic evidence of the high regard in which this program
and our University is held by the Department of State,” Clem
said, noting that this announcement comes on the heels
of the naming of the fifth consecutive U.S. Air Force national
security fellow
in the Department of International Relations.
Ambassador Meece has had a
brilliant career in the State Department since joining the
Foreign Service in 1979. He
served as deputy
chief of mission in two different embassies and as the
director of Central African Affairs at the State Department
before
becoming ambassador to Malawi in 2000. As a diplomat
working on Central
Africa, he worked tirelessly to bring peace to a particular
war-torn part of the African continent during the 1990s.
Interestingly, Clem noted,
Professor John Clark, one of the country’s
leading specialists on Africa and now chair of the
International Relations Department, served as an intern in
the U.S. Embassy in
Brazzaville, Congo in 1990, where he met then deputy
chief of mission Meece.
Clark said of Meece: “He is the finest example of the diplomat
one can imagine: well-informed, diligent, tactful, dedicated to
peaceful outcomes, and full of good humor. He is a great credit
to the State Department and to the country. He will bring to our
students and faculty a wealth of real-world experience to share
both about the role of the professional diplomat and about Africa
in particular.”
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