About Anne
For many years she travelled to post-conflict areas throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe, interviewing young people and writing about what she saw and heard. Her teen and adult novels originate from these interviews: fiction based on fact. The topics vary from AIDS survival to child soldiers.
When she kept coming up against the same questions about peacebuilding again and again, she went back to school to try and find some answers. Having earned her undergraduate degree at Stanford University, she re-entered academia as a "mature student" and in 2015, defended her PhD in International Relations at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. Her PhD is entitled: Speaking Peace into Being: Voice, Youth and Agency in a Deeply Divided Society. It explores the roles of young people--specifically their voices--in conflict and peacebuilding.
Teaching and writing. Suspense novels and children’s books. Listening, speaking to and about young people--these are the tools of Anne’s trade: Words--both written and spoken.
You never know where Anne is. For the last four years she has served as the first Chief Diversity Officer at the University of Amsterdam. She also lectures at Amsterdam University College, where she teaches Human Rights and Human Security; International Relations Theory and Practice; and Peace Lab (a one-month intensive class about peacebuilding, peacekeeping, and peacemaking during which she takes students to Kosovo or Rwanda for ten days). In 2012 she lived in Cape Town, conducting fieldwork for her PhD. In 2010 she moved to Scotland for a year.
In 2011 she revisited her alma mater Stanford University, and spoke on “Engaging with issues that matter,” and in 2012 she returned to Stanford and lectured on her research. Previously, she also gave talks such as “Winning the peace--The power of young people’s voices in places of conflict” at the following venues: West Point Military Academy, New York; Harvard National Model United Nations, Boston; University of the Free State, South Africa; and Beirut, Lebanon.
Anne continues to conduct research in the field of Peace and Conflict studies, and is currently writing about Indigenous Rights.