John Slocum

John Slocum holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Chicago, with a specialization in comparative politics and Russian studies. He worked for eighteen years (1997-2016) at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, a private grantmaking institution headquartered in Chicago and active in more than sixty countries. At MacArthur, he served as Director of the Initiative on Global Migration and Human Mobility (2006-2012) and the Migration Program Area (2012-2016). In these roles, he directed grantmaking on international migration governance, the relationship between migration and development, immigration policy in the United States, and migrant rights and labor migration in Mexico. He also directed the MacArthur Foundation's Higher Education Initiative in Russia (2005-2013), providing support to independent universities, thinks tanks, academic journals, and scholarly networks in Russia; and he was Program Officer for MacArthur’s Research and Writing Grant Competition (1997-2004). His published research includes articles on nationality politics in Russia, the development of philanthropy in Russia, and transnational philanthropic approaches to migration. He has been an assistant professor of Political Science at the University of Oklahoma, a Visiting Fellow at the Maecenata Institute for Philanthropy and Civil Society in Berlin, and a Visiting Practitioner at the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University.