Founding Dean of Media and Communications, Aga Kahn University, Nairobi, Africa
Berlin Prize Fellow - Class of Spring 1999
Michael Meyer is the founding dean of the Graduate School of Media and Communications at Aga Khan University in Nairobi. He was previously the communications director and chief speechwriter for the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Prior, he held the position of Newsweek’s Bureau Chief for Germany and Central Europe, where he chronicled the break-up of communist Europe and German unification, as well as the decade-long war in the Balkans. Meyer is the winner of two Overseas Press Club Awards and appears regularly as a commentator for MSNBC, CNN, Fox News, C-Span, NPR, and other broadcast networks. Between 1999 and 2001, he worked in Kosovo with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, after which he returned to Newsweek as the magazine’s Europe Editor. He is the author of The Alexander Complex, an examination of the psychology of American empire builders, and the Year that Changed the World: the Untold Story of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, an eyewitness account of the revolutions of 1989, published in ten languages and rated one of the “ten best books of 2009” by the Washington Post. He is a member of the New York Council on Foreign Relations and was an Inaugural Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.