US-Ireland Alliance

MITCHELL SCHOLAR JIMMY SONI

Jimmy Soni, at age 27, is the managing editor of the Huffington Post Media Group and is co-author of the just-published Rome's Last Citizen, a biography of Cato the Younger, Julius Caesar's arch nemesis. A perfect representative of his generation’s refusal to be pigeonholed, his interests have long straddled the worlds of politics and policy on one hand and journalism and media on the other. He has been a policy aide for Mayor Adrian Fenty of Washington, DC, and began his career at McKinsey and Co., where, among other projects, he worked at the firm's internal think-tank, the McKinsey Global Institute. His commentary has appeared in the Atlantic and the Huffington Post and on NPR, among other outlets.

After graduating with honors from Duke University, where he designed his own major and played numerous leadership roles on campus, Jimmy headed to University College Cork, where he studied politics as a member of the Mitchell Scholars Class of 2008. But he didn’t have his eye only on the body politic. “I told the US-Ireland Alliance that I wanted to go to Ireland to study politics,” he says. “But that was only half true! Once my scholarship was safely in hand and my passport safely stamped, I could admit that I partly came to investigate how an island the size of South Carolina could give birth to so many of the world’s masters. Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, Shaw, Wilde, Heaney -- each called this place home. Surely it was something in the water, and I wanted a taste.” 

Jimmy is a Truman National Security Fellow, a board member of the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University, a member of the Millennial Thought Partners of the Aspen Institute, and a mentor-editor of the Op-Ed Project, which aims to increase the diversity of voices making their way onto global opinion pages. AdWeek named him one of the Young Influentials for 2012, its selection of 20 people under 40 who are “wicked smart and rebooting your world."

But interestingly, this man in motion says that for him, the “great blessing” of his year as a Mitchell Scholar was the space the Scholarship afforded him to breathe, to reflect, to gain perspective -- “to put the gear in reverse and slow down.”