Academic Institutions · Washington, D.C., United States · Since 2012

Mortara Center for International Studies Futuro Host

The Mortara Center for International Studies sits inside Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service as the research engine of one of the most consequential international-affairs schools in the United States. Founded inside Georgetown's SFS at 37th and O Streets in Washington, the Center promotes interdisciplinary scholarship on the international political, social, and economic questions that shape global governance — from the political economy of the energy transition to international development and the dynamics of global political economy. Across its programs — the Mortara Research Seminar, the Political Economy Seminar, the Mortara Undergraduate Research Fellowships (MURF), the Lepgold Book Prize, the ASAP grants for faculty research — Mortara has built a generation of scholarship at the highest level of academic seriousness about how the world actually works.

TypeAcademic Institutions

HeadquartersWashington, D.C., United States

First Convening2012

DesignationFuturo Host

mortara.georgetown.edu →

Nature of Collaboration

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Shared Work

Engagements & convenings

2012 · Advisory

The Origin Conversation — Mortara, Albright, and the Founding of BeNeXT

Among the first conversations that brought BeNeXT Global into existence took place at the Mortara Center for International Studies. In 2012 and 2013, as Hector H. Lopez and co-founder Andrew Hampshire — both graduates of Georgetown's School of Foreign Service — were still moving the BeNeXT thesis from idea to institution, they returned to their alma mater and to Mortara specifically. At the helm of the Center was Madeleine Albright, then the former Secretary of State and the institutional figure most associated in the United States with the conviction that diplomacy, scholarship, and democratic leadership belong together.

What Happened

Albright was excited about the initiative. She listened, advised, and gave tips along the way — counsel that continued ever since BeNeXT's founding in 2012 and 2013. That early endorsement from one of the most consequential American statespersons of the era, given at the institutional address of the SFS itself, helped shape BeNeXT's institutional posture in its earliest formative period.

What It Produced

An origin-era institutional blessing for BeNeXT Global from the Mortara Center and from Secretary Albright personally. The kind of upstream relationship that doesn't show up in convening photo galleries but is upstream of why BeNeXT could step into the world with the seriousness it has.

2019 · Convening

Futuro MMXIX — Major Host Within Georgetown

When Futuro MMXIX convened at Georgetown for the inaugural cycle of BeNeXT's flagship convening, the Mortara Center was one of its major host nodes — the research-and-scholarship institution within Georgetown's SFS that hosted significant programming for the cohort.

What Happened

Project authors moved through Mortara's programs and physical space at 37th and O Streets, engaging the Center's interdisciplinary scholarship on the political-economy questions that sit at the heart of hemispheric governance. The Mortara hosting placed the inaugural Futuro cohort directly inside the SFS research infrastructure that produces the policy-relevant knowledge BeNeXT's project authors are being formed to deploy.

What It Produced

A second documented Mortara hosting of BeNeXT programming. A continuing institutional relationship between BeNeXT and the SFS research center that helped midwife the ecosystem into being a decade earlier — the kind of long-arc institutional partnership that traces back to the very first conversations and continues today.

Advisory

Current Relationship — Pauline Courteille

BeNeXT's current institutional contact at the Mortara Center is Pauline Courteille — originally of France, today inside one of the most consequential international-studies research centers in American higher education. The relationship she carries forward is the continuation of the institutional thread that began with Madeleine Albright a decade ago.

What Happened

Through Pauline, BeNeXT maintains an active working channel with the Mortara Center — the kind of working contact that allows the relationship to continue beyond any single director or convening cycle and to remain available for the next Georgetown-anchored Futuro convening when the institutional moment calls for it.

What It Produced

An active, named institutional channel between BeNeXT and Mortara today — the relationship that began as a founding-era conversation with Secretary Albright has matured into a continuing working partnership with the next generation of Mortara leadership.

Author × AI

Mortara Center for International Studies stands among the institutions shaping Author × AI at BeNeXT Global. Authors emerge from this work — and from those authors, the next generation of institutions that hold the threshold. The next author could be you; the next cornerstone could be your institution.

BeNeXTMMXXVIAuthor what's next

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