Steve Israel, Director

Former Congressman Steve Israel heads the non-partisan Cornell University Institute of Politics and Global Affairs at the Brooks School.

Professor Israel was a Member of Congress for sixteen years. He left in 2017, having served as House Democrats’ chief political strategist between 2011-2015 as Chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. He also served as a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee.

Professor Israel’s political insights appear regularly in the New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic Magazine, and on MSNBC, CNN, Sixty Minutes and HBO, among others.

He has previously served as a Tisch College Visiting Fellow at Tufts University and as an Institute of Politics Pritzker Fellow at the University of Chicago.

Professor Israel is the author of two satirical looks at Washington politics: The Global War on Morris and Big Guns.

Douglas Kriner, Faculty Director

Douglas Kriner’s research and teaching interests focus on American political institutions and the separation of powers, as well as on US foreign policy and science and health policy. In addition to his affiliation with Brooks, he is the Clinton Rossiter Professor in American Institutions in the Department of Government.

Professor Kriner is the author or co-author of five books, including most recently The Myth of the Imperial Presidency: How Public Opinion Checks the Unilateral Executive.  Other books include Investigating the President: Congressional Checks on Presidential Power and The Particularistic President: Executive Branch Politics and Political Inequality. He has received the D.B. Hardeman Prize and the Richard F. Fenno Jr. Award for the best book on Congress and the Richard E. Neustadt award for the best book on the presidency.

Professor Kriner’s research has appeared in journals including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, and Journal of Politics, and his research on science and health policy has appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine, Science Advances, and Energy Policy, among other outlets.

Erin King Sweeney, Senior Associate Director

King Sweeney brings years of experience as a practicing attorney and former Republican elected official on Long Island. As a councilwoman and majority leader in the town of Hempstead, King Sweeney was known for developing deep relationships across the political spectrum and using these friendships to forge solutions to seemingly intractable problems. A fierce advocate of downtown development and economic opportunity, King Sweeney was considered a champion for the working class. King Sweeney, president of King Sweeney Strategies LLC, also serves on the board of the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Garden City, New York. She joined the Institute in 2021.

Emily Anderson, Program Director

Emily is responsible for both communications and programming at the institute, serving as both the external press point-of-contact and the programmatic and logistical lead on planning and executing events with strategic vision and tactical creativity.

Previously, Anderson graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Communications and Business Administration from High Point University. Prior to joining the Institute, Emily obtained a diverse background in both media and politics. In 2017, she was a content writer for the day time talk show “The Wendy Williams Show.” The following year, she pursued politics and worked at the office of Congressman Tom Suozzi, rising from Staff Assistant to Immigration Caseworker, and finally to Finance Director.