Victoria Clement

Dr. Victoria Clement joined the American Foreign Policy Council in August 2026 as Senior Fellow for Central Asia.  She is a regional specialist with an emphasis on the history, culture, and politics of Turkmenistan, where she lived in 1997 and again from 2001-2003. She is also simultaneously the Deputy Chair for South & Central Asia Area Studies at the National Foreign Affairs Training Center, a position she has served in since 2024. Prior to that, she was the 2012-U.S. Embassy Policy Specialist Program in Turkmenistan and a 2016-17 Fellow with the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars.

Dr. Clement is the author of Learning to Become Turkmen: Literacy, Language and Power, 1924- 2014(Pittsburgh University Press, 2018) and dozens of articles and book chapters. She is a founding member of the Central Eurasian Studies Society, where she was on the Executive Board from 2008-2011. She has been a guest lecturer at Kazakhstan’s Partnership for Peace Training Center (KAZCENT) and is currently on the Editorial Board of the Central Asia Higher Education Review (CAHER). She has consulted for the U.S. Department of Defense, the British Foreign Office, the Smithsonian Institution, and Moscow’s National Research University. She has taught at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, the Marine Corps University, and the Naval Postgraduate School.