Faculty
IEP Faculty
Dr. Laura Engel
Dr. Laura C. Engel is an Associate Professor of International Education and International Affairs at the George Washington University (GW), where she is Director of the International Education Program, co-director of the cross-departmental certificate program, Incorporating International Perspectives into Education, and co-chair of the GW UNESCO Chair in International Education for Development. She also is a faculty affiliate in the Elliott School of International Affairs’ Institute of European, Russian and Eurasian Studies.
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Dr. Engel's research focuses on (1) global trends affecting educational governance and policy in federal systems, including trends in educational decentralization and the education policy uses of international assessments; (2) education policies and practices related to global citizenship, where she is currently leading the annual evaluation of the DCPS Study Abroad Initiative and the NSF funded Arctic PIRE #60above60 pilot program. Her work has appeared in over 40 articles, books, and book chapters, including in Journal of Educational Research, Comparative Education Review, Journal of Curriculum Studies, Globalisation, Societies and Education, and Research in Comparative and International Education.
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Dr. Engel is the recipient of several teaching awards, including the 2013 GSEHD Excellence in Teaching Award and the 2017 DEL Award in Teaching Excellence. Previously, Engel worked in England and Spain, spending two years as a research fellow in the UNESCO Centre for Comparative Educational Research at the University of Nottingham, UK, where she conducted research on two European Union funded projects in education and social policy. She holds a Ph.D. in Education Policy Studies and a Master of Education in Curriculum and Instruction from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and a Bachelor of Arts in Spanish and Global Cultures from University of Wisconsin-Madison.
lce@gwu.edu
Dr. James H. Williams
Dr. James H. Williams is UNESCO Chair in International Education for Development and Associate Professor of International Education & International Affairs at The George Washington University (GWU). He is on the faculty of GWU’s Graduate School of Education & Human Development and Elliott School of International Affairs, where he teaches graduate classes on education and development; education policy in developing countries; education of marginalized communities; education in emergencies; and international/comparative education. His research interests lie in three areas: policies to improve education in low and middle-income countries; the effects of education on conflict and social cohesion; and predictors of socio-economic gradients. He is currently working on a longitudinal study of dropout in Cambodia, a series of edited books on textbooks and national identity, a comparative case study of higher education for development and social cohesion in Sri Lanka and Malaysia; and a study of U.S. development assistance.
In addition to GWU, Dr. Williams has taught at Ohio University, Athens, and J.F. Oberlin University, Tokyo. He has worked at USAID as a AAAS Fellow and served as Editor of The FORUM for Advancing Basic Education and Literacy at the Harvard Institute for International Development. He has been a visiting scholar at the Graduate School of International Development, Nagoya University and at the Center for International Cooperation in Education at Hiroshima University, as well as an invited professor at Kobe University’s Graduate School of International Cooperation Studies.
Dr. Williams has consulted with a number of development agencies including UNICEF, UNU-WIDER, UNESCO, World Bank, FAO, UNHCR, FHI 360, Education Development Center, American Institutes of Research, Creative Associates International, etc., working on development assistance in over 20 countries. He has co-authored or co-edited four books and over 40 journal articles/book chapters and monographs and guest edited/co-edited special issues of journals on three occasions, and is on the inaugural editorial board of the Journal of Education in Emergencies. His most recent book, (Re)Constructing Memory: School Textbooks and the Imagination of the Nation, has recently been published by Sense Publishers. He holds his doctorate from Harvard University, Cambridge Massachusetts, and his masters from Florida State University.
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jhw@gwu.edu
Dr. Bernhard Streitwieser
Bernhard Streitwieser’s research looks comparatively at the impact of globalization on the internationalization of higher education. He has three main focus areas:
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Mobility: research on study abroad, international student exchange, and the professional identity of ‘scholar-practitioners’ managing international education
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Integration: research on the integration of migrants and refugees into higher education, with a geographic focus on Europe (Germany in particular) and the United States
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Competition: research on international branch campuses and education hubs
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Dr. Streitwieser earned his PhD in International and Comparative Education from Columbia University, Teachers College, his MS in Applied Linguistics from Georgetown University, and his BA in International Relations and Minor in Spanish from the University of Virginia.
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From 2010-2013, Dr. Streitwieser was a visiting professor at Berlin's Humboldt Universität, where he also served in 2012-2013 as Interim Department Chair for the Department of Comparative Education. At the HU he lectured on the internationalization of higher education, student identity development, and global mobility and conducted research funded by the Fulbright Commission and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) on the EU’s Erasmus Mobility Programme. From 2002-2010 Dr. Streitwieser was an Associate Director and Senior Researcher at Northwestern University's Searle Center for Advancing Learning and Teaching, and a Lecturer in the School of Education and Social Policy. From 2006-08 he was also the Associate Director of Northwestern’s Study Abroad Office.
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Before his time at Northwestern, Dr. Streitwieser was a guest researcher at the Max-Planck-Institut für-Bildungsforschung in Berlin and also a Research Analyst at American Institutes for Research in Washington, D.C.
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In 2014, Dr. Streitwieser published an edited book on Internationalisation of Higher Education and Global Mobility for the Oxford Studies in Comparative Education series, and in 2016 he published a second edited book, International Higher Education’s Scholar-Practitioners: Bridging Research and Practice, for Symposium Books.
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Dr. Streitwieser's publications have appeared in books by Springer Press, Routledge, Teachers College Press, Sense, Symposium, IGI Global Press, the Schneider Verlag, and the Verlag Dr. Kovac, and in the journals Higher Education, Journal of Innovative Higher Education, International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, Research in International and Comparative Education, Journal of the Knowledge Economy, Educational Research & Evaluation, European Education: Issues and Studies, and the American Journal of Evaluation.
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In 2016, Dr. Streitwieser won a research grant from the International Education Research Foundation for his study on “German Higher Education and Credentialing Newly Arrived Immigrants,” focusing on Syrian and other newly arrived refugees integrating into German higher education. His research for this work included taking GW students on a study tour to Berlin and Bonn in June 2016, where they met with 15 policy makers and researchers at ministries, institutes, foundations and universities; a return data collection trip in January 2017 included interviews with refugee students as part of a Berlin-based research group; a third data collection trip is planned to Germany in Summer of 2017.
Dr. Streitwieser most recently presented his research on refugee integration at a conference he organized for the German Alexander von Humboldt Foundation on migration on October 22, 2016; at a research symposium he organized with invited experts at GW on March 23, 2017; and will present this June 22nd at the Summer Seminar “International Education in a New Political Environment” at Boston College’s Center for International Higher Education and with World Education Services.​
streitwieser@gwu.edu
Dr. Meggan Madden
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Dr. Madden’s research and teaching examine policies and practices that support increased access to international education opportunities for marginalized populations. She is currently investigating the federal, state and institutional policies that support undocumented students to study abroad while pursuing a post-secondary degree under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Dr. Madden’s publications address topics such as internationalization of higher education, policy learning and borrowing, quality assurance in higher education, and the role of international organizations in higher education, cross-national policy.
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Her research agenda focuses on international higher education through the lens of supporting underrepresented communities and students. This support could be in examining the promotion, funding and student services support for underserved students to access international education opportunities; it could be in understanding the support of underserved students once they are enrolled in post-secondary education; or it could be in understanding the supra-national and regional policy frameworks that support international student mobility.
Dr. Madden’s research agenda is influenced by her professional and scholarly work that spans 20 years in higher education. While she started her career in higher education as a college admissions counselor, she moved to working with international admissions serving as recruiter, marketing supervisor, international credentials evaluator, and member of committees that reviewed international students support on-campus. Upon completion of her Ph.D., Dr. Madden served as the Director of the MasterCard Foundation Scholars Program at Arizona State University, a $27 million dollar grant to support students from Sub-Saharan Africa access higher education opportunities. In addition to her work with international student recruitment and programming, she worked as a faculty-led programs specialist at Washington State University.
There are two levels Dr. Madden examines in comparative and international higher education: 1) supra-national and regional perspectives of student mobility and national development and 2) national and institutional level analyses of student services that support underserved students participate in global academic mobility. At the supra-national and regional levels, she has examined higher education regionalization and quality assurance capacity building in Asia and the Pacific; and explored the role of international organizations in higher education policy development and higher education research. Her research on these topics have been published in Higher Education and in a book chapter with Dr. Karen Mundy in International Organizations and Higher Education Policy: Thinking Globally, Acting Locally?, edited by Alma Maldonado-Maldonado and Roberta Bassett. At the national and institutional levels, she analyzed Canadian policies and doctoral student perspectives of international academic mobility for research, which she published with Jane Knight in the Canadian Journal of Higher Education. She also participated on a research team that conducted a retrospective tracer study of Sub-Saharan African students who received their undergraduate or graduate degrees in N. America, funded by the MasterCard Foundation. Dr. Madden is currently working on understanding federal, state, and institutional policies and practices that support undocumented students with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status access education abroad.
The purpose of these different levels of research are to understand how international higher education can support national and regional development, the building of meaningful intercultural relationships, mutual understanding, respect and a stronger sense of global or regional citizenship identities. With this purpose in mind, she was an editor of the first edition of the textbook Comparative and International Education: Issues for Teachers. Prior to joining GW, Dr. Madden taught International Education Management at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies and as the Director for the MasterCard Foundation Scholars Program at Arizona State University.
Dr. Madden holds a B.A. in Religion/Philosophy and World Perspectives from Principia College and a M.A. and Ph.D. in higher education with a specialization in comparative, international and development education from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto.
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Parking Info

Parking on campus is currently a challenge due to ongoing construction, so we strongly encourage the use of public transportation (Foggy Bottom Metro Stop)
If you choose to drive to GW, a limited number of visitor parking spaces are available in the Academic Center Parking Garage (801 22nd Street, NW; entrance on I Street, NW, between 21st and 22nd Streets) and in the Marvin Center Parking Garage (800 21st Street, NW; entrance on H Street, NW, between 21st and 22nd Streets). The parking fee is $18 per day or for a portion of the day (subject to change).
On-campus street parking is available, but it is also limited and time limits are strictly enforced.