John D. Ciorciari serves as provost and executive vice chancellor of Indiana University Bloomington, following his service as interim provost beginning in February 2026.
During his interim tenure, Ciorciari worked closely with faculty and academic leaders to advance key campus priorities, including strategic faculty hiring, research infrastructure, academic policy, open inquiry and the redesign of Bloomington’s General Education curriculum.
Ciorciari joined IU in 2024 as dean of the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. Under his leadership, the school expanded interdisciplinary programs, strengthened global partnerships and created new opportunities for students to connect their academic work to complex, real-world challenges.
Before joining IU, Ciorciari was a professor at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, where he served as associate dean for research and policy engagement and directed both the Weiser Diplomacy Center and the International Policy Center. His prior experience includes serving as an academic visitor at the University of Oxford, an Andrew Carnegie Fellow, an Asia Society Fellow, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, a policy official in the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of International Affairs and an associate at the international law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell. He also serves as a senior legal advisor to the Documentation Center of Cambodia.
Ciorciari’s scholarship examines international politics and law, with a particular focus on how states navigate power, conflict and cooperation in the Indo-Pacific region. His first book, The Limits of Alignment (2010), explored how small states and middle powers respond to great-power rivalry. He has also written extensively on U.S., Chinese and Indian foreign policy and engagement in Southeast Asia. With Kiyoteru Tsutsui, he co-edited The Courteous Power (2021), which examines Japan’s distinctive approach to the region.
His research also explores peacebuilding, United Nations interventions and international criminal justice. In Sovereignty Sharing in Fragile States (2021), he examined how international actors have shared core governance responsibilities with sovereign states, including Cambodia, Guatemala, Lebanon, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Timor-Leste. He also co-authored Hybrid Justice (2014) with Anne Heindel, an account of the law and politics surrounding the United Nations-backed Khmer Rouge tribunal in Cambodia.
IU Bloomington is renowned for its academic excellence. I care deeply about helping sustain and build on the tradition and positive momentum we have across the Bloomington campus.
John Ciorciari, Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor
