Diplomat Luigi Einaudi honored for defense education work

Luigi Einaudi
University Photography file photo
Luigi Einaudi speaks at Cornell in 2005.

When Luigi Einaudi left the U.S. Department of State after 23 years promoting peace and cooperation in Latin America, he decided to share what he had learned with students and scholars around the world.

Einaudi’s work as a teacher was recognized Jan. 12 in Washington, D.C., when Undersecretary of State Thomas A. Shannon Jr. presented him with the Perry Award for Excellence in Defense and Security Education at the National Defense University’s William J. Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies.

Einaudi has served as U.S. ambassador to the Organization of American States and acting secretary general of that institution. He has been recognized for brokering an agreement that ended a centuries-old conflict between Peru and Ecuador.

His father, Mario Einaudi, was a professor of government at Cornell from 1945 to 1972 and the founding director of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.

Luigi Einaudi is a trustee of the San Giacomo Charitable Foundation, which has supported the Einaudi Center and the Cornell Institute for European Studies (CIES) with funds for scholarships, fellowships, research grants, workshops, conferences and the Einaudi Center’s Distinguished Speaker Series and Practitioner-in-Residence Program. The foundation also contributes to an initiative on migration and refugees, jointly organized by the Einaudi Center and CIES, which includes public lectures, roundtables, workshops and a multidisciplinary working group.

“For many years Luigi has generously supported the Einaudi Center’s broad and interdisciplinary approach to foreign policy and international studies, which his father seeded at the center,” said Hirokazu Miyazaki, director of the Einaudi Center and professor of anthropology. “We are profoundly grateful to Luigi for his dedication to this tradition.” 

Einaudi also has served as a board member of the Fondazione Luigi Einaudi in Turin, Italy, named for his grandfather, the second president of the Italian Republic. The Fondazione has hosted conferences in partnership with the Einaudi Center, CIES and Cornell’s Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. It also is the home of CIES’s annual Cornell in Turin summer program, which includes an annual tour led by Einaudi of his family’s ancestral villa in Dogliani, Italy.

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1936, Einaudi moved to Ithaca with his family as a boy. After a stint in the U.S. Army, he earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1967. He has taught at Harvard, Wesleyan and Georgetown universities and the University of California, Los Angeles, and has lectured widely in the United States and abroad. He was a Bartels World Affairs Fellow at Cornell in 1993, and in 2015 gave a public lecture on the Peru-Ecuador war.

“The Perry Award is a tremendous honor, capping a long and distinguished career for Luigi Einaudi as a diplomat and as an educator,” said CIES director Christopher Way, associate professor of government. “Luigi and his family have long been wonderful friends of the Einaudi Center and our institute, and we are thrilled that he’s been recognized with this prestigious award.”

Einaudi is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Academy of Diplomacy, and since 2007 has been a distinguished visiting fellow at the Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Defense University.

Jonathan Miller is associate director for communications at the Einaudi Center.

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Melissa Osgood