Current Roles
Dr. Paul Christopher Manuel is Academic Director of the Georgetown University Foreign Policy Academy, a three-week residential program that in Summer 2026 brought 94 students from 35 states and 20 countries to Washington to learn from ambassadors, State Department officials and foreign service officers, and which he will direct again in 2027. The story of the 2026 program is told day by day on this site. He is an affiliated professor at Georgetown University, where he has taught since 2009, first at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute, now the McCourt School of Public Policy, and, since 2023, also in the School of Continuing Studies and the Department of Government. In 2026 he also returned to Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire, to teach in the Enduring Questions First Year Program. He is a research fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown and a local affiliate of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University, an affiliation that goes back to 1998.
Previous Academic Roles
Dr. Manuel has spent more than three decades teaching comparative politics and building the kind of programs — an institute of politics in New Hampshire, leadership programs in Maryland and Washington — that take students out of the classroom and into the institutions they study, on the view that students learn politics as much by working inside institutions as by reading about them. He has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in comparative politics, comparative public policy, international relations and leadership.
At Saint Anselm College, where he arrived in 1992, he chaired the Department of Politics from 1993 to 2008 and co-founded the New Hampshire Institute of Politics, later serving as its research center director and executive director. He went on to be chief operating officer of the Institute for Global Engagement (2008–2010), founding director of the Institute for Leadership at Mount St. Mary’s University, now the Ethical Leaders Program (2010–2016), and director of the Leadership Program in American University’s School of Public Affairs (2015–2022), and he has since taught in the Washington programs of Claremont McKenna College and New York University. Earlier in his career he taught at Boston University, Suffolk University, the University of New Hampshire and the University of Maryland at College Park, and he has twice served on the elected executive council of the New England Political Science Association. Each position is described on the Teaching & Leadership page.
Research Activities
Manuel’s research has followed Portugal since the Carnation Revolution of April 25, 1974, a subject he first took up as a Fulbright scholar at the Universidade de Coimbra in 1990–1991, when he interviewed the military officers who had planned and carried out the coup. Those interviews, published in English as Voices of the Revolution (2019) and in Portuguese as Vozes da Revolução (Tinta-da-China, 2024), were designated historically significant by Portugal’s Commission for the 50th Anniversary of April 25. His later work has moved outward from the transition itself — to civil society and social movements, to the Catholic Church and the faith-based organizations that still carry much of the burden of social welfare in Portugal and elsewhere, and, most recently, to the contest over the memory of the revolution as Chega has turned April 25 into a political weapon. He divides his time between Washington, D.C., and Cambridge, Massachusetts.
He has authored, co-authored or edited fifteen books and numerous scholarly articles, most recently The Mosaic of Comparative Politics (Cognella, 2026), Pope Francis Reconsidered (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026), and After the Carnations: Social Movements in Portugal Since the 25 April 1974 Revolution (Liverpool University Press, 2025). The full list is on the Books page, and the Portugal work is gathered on Portugal & the April 25 Revolution.
