School of International Affairs announces two new faculty members

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – Two new faculty members, John Creamer and Christian Elliott, will be joining the Penn State School of International Affairs (SIA) beginning in July 2024. Combined, Creamer and Elliott bring expertise in policy, diplomacy, national security, sustainability, and environmental politics.

“I’m pleased that John and Christian will be joining SIA following thorough search processes with many worthy candidates,” said Dr. Mitchell Smith, SIA director and professor of international affairs. “These new faculty members bring us additional practical and scholarly expertise in critical areas. We will be able to expand offerings for our students in ways that address emergent global dynamics and advance experiential learning. I know that both John and Christian are excited to engage with SIA students and will be highly effective in doing so.”

Creamer will be a professor of practice at SIA, bringing extensive policy and operational experience—both in Washington, D.C., and abroad—as a senior U.S. diplomat working on security, law enforcement, migration, commercial, governance, political and human rights issues primarily in the Western Hemisphere. He is a career Foreign Service Officer who served in numerous roles with the U.S. Department of State from 1986 to 2023. Most recently, Creamer was the acting vice chancellor and assistant professor at the College of International Security Affairs at the National Defense University, where he taught national security strategy, statecraft, and irregular warfare. From 2018 to 2021, he served as chargé d’affaires/deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City. In addition to Mexico, his foreign tours include Nicaragua, South Africa, Haiti, Argentina, Colombia, and Bolivia, where he served as chargé d’affairés for three years.

“I'm excited to be joining the faculty at the School of International Affairs and look forward to learning from my colleagues and students,” Creamer said.

Elliott will be an assistant professor of international affairs at SIA. His research focuses on how the environmental impacts of market actors are governed beyond borders, especially for banks, insurance companies, and pensions. He also explores the effects of global governance complexity and how public and private authorities collaborate or compete in the climate regime. Prior to accepting an appointment at SIA, Elliott was a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) postdoctoral fellow at Brown University's Climate Solutions Lab. His work has been published in the Review of International Political Economy, Regulation & Governance, and International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law, and Economics, among other journals. He has also contributed chapters to the edited volumes Uncertainty in Global Politics (2023, Routledge) and The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Environmental Politics (2021, Oxford University Press).

“I’m ecstatic about joining a multidisciplinary school and training the next generation of leaders in international affairs,” Elliott said. “Beyond SIA, I also look forward to engaging with and learning from the phenomenal research on climate change and sustainability ongoing across institutions and departments at Penn State.”

Learn more about SIA faculty at sia.psu.edu/faculty.