Jessica Carter

Jessica Carter is a Communications Specialist and Team Leader at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence. She joined the EUI in 2022 after having served as Deputy Director of Communications for six years at the European University Association. Previously, Jessica worked at the Aspen Institute’s Rome headquarters for nearly a decade, where she was co-founder and Managing Editor of the award-winning journal on geopolitics, Aspenia online. A trained journalist, Jessica spent the first six years of her career as a political reporter and anchor working in television newsrooms in the United States.

Gun control: the big issue staring Americans in the face, again

Affordable healthcare, gay marriage, relations with Cuba and an Iran nuclear deal. Every time we convince ourselves that the progressive identity of America is in decline, it springs to life again. This is the result of courageous…

Sexism in American politics, the “other” skeleton in the closet

During the 2008 US presidential campaign, my European colleagues often asked me, “is a woman or a black man more likely to win the Democratic nomination?” I had the feeling it was a question they already had an answer to: Considering the…

The horrors of ISIS: How did we get to this point?

We are bewildered and disoriented by the brutality: headlines warn of systematic beheadings of Muslims and non-Muslims alike, evidence of Christian genocide, men being burned alive, mass executions on the beaches of the Mediterranean – a…

Language to win elections: middle-class economics and the parent agenda in America

What started with the popular “Wall Street vs Main Street” metaphor during the global financial crisis turned more recently into a war of words that put “the middle class” front-and-center in a fight where Republicans and Democrats alike…

The fearful white America that fails to understand black America

I know that America, I know it very well. And I know exactly what it was thinking when the grand jury’s decision came down in Ferguson and the country erupted in protest and debate. I know because I grew up in Missouri, in the opposite…

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