I am pleased to introduce a new crop of guest bloggers for the 2011-2012 academic year.

Catherine Weaver hails from the Lyndon Johnson School of Public Affairs at UT Austin where she teaches international political economy, specializing (among other things) the culture, behavior and reform of international financial organizations – a smoking hot IR topic if there ever was one. She is the author of The Hypocrisy Trap and the co-editor of Review of International Political Economy.

Joshua Busby teaches with Kate at the Johnson School, but specializes in transnational relations, climate change, national security and energy policy. His new book Moral Movements in Foreign Policy has been hailed as “pathbreaking” by Thomas Risse and “nuanced and disciplined” by Robert Keohane – though all that discipline won’t, I suspect, keep Josh from cutting loose on various topics: he is a contributor to policy pieces for a number of think tanks including Brookings, the Center for a New American Security, the German Marshall Fund, and the Woodrow Wilson Center, as well as numerous scholarly outlets (where his work on celebrity activism is some of the hippest in the TAN literature). Josh is a member of Council on Foreign Relations and the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Megan MacKenzie is in transit from Victoria University of Wellington to University of Sydney, and will bring a critical-feminist-national-human-security-studies perspective to the Duck from down below. (Cynthia Enloe always did say that that’s where you should look for the real story of power politics in IR!) Megan studied at University of Alberta and was previously a Research Fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center. Her work has focused on gender and post-conflict reconstruction in Africa. She is beginning a new project on gender integration in US, Canadian and Australian armed forces.

And last but not least please welcome our most junior Ducklet, Alana Tiemessen. Currently a Visiting Professor at University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Alana just completed her dissertation at University of British Columbia. Her work centers on international norms and transitional justice and she blogs at Transitional Justice Blog, where she covers developments in Kenya, Rwanda, Bosnia and globally. We look forward to her coverage of the Mladic trial… or whatever else strikes her intellectual fancy.

Please stay tuned for an exciting summer of new coverage from these folks as well as updates from our regulars.