Virginia Bouvier is a professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and a senior advisor for Peace Processes at the US Institute of Peace. She joined USIP in January 2003 and has headed USIP’s Colombia team since 2006. She was seconded in 2012-13 to serve as a process design expert for the United Nations Standby Team of Mediation Experts. For the previous seven years, she was an assistant professor of Latin American literature and culture at the University of Maryland. From 1982 to 1989, Bouvier served as senior associate at the Washington Office on Latin America, where she focused on Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. Bouvier has also served as a consultant and research director for the Women’s Leadership Conference of the Americas, a joint project of the Inter-American Dialogue and the International Center for Research on Women, and as a consultant for USAID, UN-Women, World Bank, Levi Strauss Foundation, Levi Strauss and Co. and the C.S. Fund. Her areas of expertise include Colombia, mediation and peace processes, conflict analysis and prevention, civil society, and gender and peacebuilding. Dr. Bouvier blogs at Colombia Calls.
She is a graduate of Wellesley College, has an MA in Spanish from the Univ. of South Carolina, and holds a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley in Latin American studies.