Program Director, Washington Academic Internship Program
Dr. Kolson is Director of the Washington Academic Internship Program, as well as leading all federal relations activities for the John Glenn School of Public Affairs.
Dr. Kolson has combined teaching and research with public service in a truly distinctive way. For more than 22 years, he worked at the National Endowment for the Humanities, where he was responsible for the program of NEH Fellowships and for grants awarded in support of scholarly editing, field archaeology, and collaborative research in the humanities and social sciences. In 1992-93, Dr. Kolson was a fellow of the Council for Excellence in Government. Throughout the 1990s, he taught in the honors program at the University of Maryland, College Park. In 1998, Dr. Kolson was a John Adams Fellow at the Institute of United States Studies, University of London. In 2001, Johns Hopkins University Press published his book, Big Plans: The Allure and Folly of Urban Design. In the fall of 2006, he held a Fulbright lectureship at the University of Oulu. Upon his return from Finland, he was detailed to the United States Department of State, where he earned a Meritorious Honor Award “for outstanding performance and initiative in the creation of the U.S. World Heritage Tentative List of UNESCO World Heritage Sites.” He retired from the federal service in 2007.
Prior to joining the staff of the NEH in 1985, Dr. Kolson taught for 15 years in the political science department at Hiram College, where he developed several off-campus study programs and was co-author of a widely adopted textbook, Public Opinion and Responsible Democracy, published by Prentice-Hall in 1976. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky in 1972.
