Hollywood actress and human rights campaigner Angelina Jolie is set to make a foray into a new career path — university professor.
The London School of Economics (LSE) has appointed the 40-year-old Oscar winner as a Visiting Professor in Practice at its Centre for Women, Peace and Security.
“I am looking forward to teaching and to learning from the students as well as to sharing my own experiences of working alongside governments and the United Nations,” Jolie said in a statement from the university Monday.
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“I hope other academic institutions will follow this example, as it is vital that we broaden the discussion on how to advance women’s rights and end impunity for crimes that disproportionately affect women, such as sexual violence in conflict.”
Her appointment coincides with the inception of a one-year Masters of Science in Women Peace and Security and she’ll join three other high profile visiting professor appointees: Jane Connors, Amnesty International’s director of international advocacy; Madeline Rees, the secretary general of the Women’s International League for Peace and Security; and Lord William Hague, former U.K. foreign secretary.
Jolie and Hague had a hand in the centre’s launch — the first of academic centre of its kind in the U.K. — in February 2015, after having co-founded the Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative in 2012.
The new Master’s program, according to the university, will offer courses on the role of women in peace and security, gender and militarization, and gender and human rights.
“Bringing practitioners, policy makers and activists together with scholars is essential in advancing knowledge and influencing global and local policy-making,” Christine Chinkin, the centre’s director, said.
Away from the big screen, Jolie has had a long relation with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees — serving as a Goodwill Ambassador from 2001 to 2012, when she was appointed as a Special Envoy for the refugee agency.
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She has addressed the UN Security council a number of times, visited camps for refugees displaced by war and natural disasters, and pressed world leaders for action on the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war.
Jolie also wrote two columns in the New York Times to raise awareness about the BRCA 1 gene — a genetic mutation that puts affected women at higher risk for breast and ovarian cancer — detailing how she underwent a double mastectomy and had her ovaries and fallopian tubes removed to lessen her risk of one day getting cancer.
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