Founding Dean of the School of Government and Policy

We are pleased to announce that Johns Hopkins University has named William G. Howell as the Inaugural Dean of the School of Government and Policy. His appointment is effective January 1, 2025.

Howell currently serves as the Sydney Stein Professor in American Politics at the University of Chicago, where he holds appointments at the Harris School of Public Policy, Department of Political Science, and the College. He is the founding director of the Center for Effective Government and the faculty director of the Civic Leadership Academy, a leadership development program for civic leaders in and around Chicago who aspire to reform institutions to work more effectively for the people they serve. Previously, he chaired the Department of Political Science at UChicago.

Howell is a distinguished scholar of American political institutions and executive power who has studied and written extensively on issues related to separation of powers, political institutions, democratic reform, and the U.S. presidency, and the normative foundations of executive power. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and American Academy of Sciences and Letters, a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow, and the author or co-author of numerous books examining the executive branch, most recently Presidents, Populism, and the Crisis of Democracy (University of Chicago, 2020).

Howell holds a PhD in political science from Stanford University and a BA from Wesleyan University.

You may read the full press release here.

Jeff Kessner and John Muckle led this search with Kahn Lee and Amy Gillespie.