Ian C. Kelly

Ian Crawford Kelly (born 1953) is an American retired Foreign Service Officer and Ambassador. He is currently serving as the Ambassador in Residence at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He is an American former statesman and senior foreign service officer who last served as the United States Ambassador to Georgia, from 2015 to 2018. He previously served as the U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) from 2010 to 2013. Prior to his ambassadorship, Kelly held a variety of high-level roles at the U.S. State Department, including serving as the department spokesman under Secretary Hillary Clinton.

Career

Before beginning his career at the State Department, Kelly taught Russian at Columbia University, where he also received his doctorate in Slavic Languages and Literatures in 1986. He also holds a B.A. from St. Olaf College and an M.A. from Northwestern University. Kelly was confirmed by the Senate on March 10, 2010, by a voice vote with bipartisan support.

Kelly's tenure as Ambassador coincided with several major geopolitical events for OSCE countries, including pro-democracy protests in Russia, a controversial constitutional amendment in Kazakhstan extending the tenure of President Nursultan Nazarbayev through 2020, and ethnic riots in Kyrgyzstan in 2010. In 2012–2013, Kelly was the U.S. Co-chair of the OSCE Minsk Group, the diplomatic mechanism set up to resolve the conflict in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. Kelly was replaced by Daniel Baer on September 10, 2013.

President Obama nominated Kelly to succeed Richard Norland as the U.S. ambassador to Georgia on March 12, 2015. He was confirmed by the Senate on June 25, 2015, and sworn in on September 11, 2015. He retired both as ambassador and from the foreign service in March 2018.

Academic career After retirement from diplomatic service, Ambassador Kelly began teaching in the Departments of International Studies and Slavic Literatures at Northwestern University in April 2018.