This POSC 395 professional development event is on Monday, March 24th at 1:00 pm in our office in SOS B15. POSC 395 students must attend at least two professional development events throughout the semester.

Join us for a coffee talk with Brent Giannotta. Brent Giannotta was born in Santa Monica and raised in Pasadena. At USC, he earned degrees in International Relations and Spanish, with a minor in public policy, and was part of the class of 2004. He spent one semester in Madrid and the following summer in The Hague, Holland, attending the Institute for International Mediation and Conflict Resolution.

After graduation, he completed intensive Arabic language programs at Columbia University, Middlebury College, and the American University in Beirut. In between programs, he completed 6-month internships at Relief International in LA, The Carter Center in Atlanta, and on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. He then received a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship to earn a graduate diploma in Middle East studies from the American University in Cairo. After graduating, he spent two years at Human Rights Watch in their Middle East division in Washington D.C., and then began working at the CIA as a counterterrorism analyst in their Syria/Iraq department.

After five-and-a-half years in government, he resigned and moved to New York to work in public relations, where he ghost-wrote op-eds for political figures and the CEOs of rights organizations. He also joined the campaign of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. After the pandemic began, he moved back to Los Angeles and published two op-eds in the LA Times on political extremism in national security. He then earned a mental health certification and began working on a psychiatric crisis response team responding to calls across Los Angeles County. Last summer, he left that job to join the Harris-Walz campaign just north of Pittsburgh. After the loss, he moved to Las Vegas, where he’s active in the local chapter of Indivisible and publishing widely on his Substack column, Sleeping Giant.

Students interested in attending should contact unruhins@usc.edu for more information and the signup link.