Leslie Dunton-Downer joins FIRE’s Advisory Council

Leslie Dunton-Downer has spent much of her career asking a deceptively simple question. How do ideas travel across time, languages, borders, and political systems?

In seeking to answer this question, Leslie’s writing traces the long arc of human communication. That’s why FIRE is pleased to welcome Leslie to our Advisory Council, where her work as a writer, producer, and scholar will bring a rich, interdisciplinary perspective to the fight for free expression.

Her books on Shakespeare, opera, and the history of English explore how language evolves from shared cultural inheritance into a global force. In The English Is Coming!: How One Language Is Sweeping the World, she follows English from its Proto-Indo-European roots to its modern role as a global lingua franca, examining what’s gained, and lost, when a language dominates worldwide conversation.

Across disciplines and formats, Leslie’s career circles core concerns over who gets to speak, who gets to listen, and what forces shape that exchange. 

As an opera librettist, Leslie’s work has premiered internationally, from Ligeia in Evian under the baton of Mstislav Rostropovich to projects in Paris, Berlin, Aspen, and Santa Fe. She has also produced albums of sacred and secular music from Tajikistan’s Gorno-Badakhshan region for the French label Buda Musique, helping preserve and share cultural traditions far outside the Western mainstream.

When Edward Snowden’s disclosures exposed the scale of modern surveillance, Leslie responded not with a white paper, but with a public conversation. Working with transmediale and NK Projekt, she co-produced The Magical Secrecy Tour, a bus tour through Berlin that invited passengers to explore and debate the city’s many cultures of surveillance — showcasing her creative range as well as her commitment to public discourse on privacy and free expression, issues that are central to FIRE’s work.

Leslie’s academic credentials are no less impressive. She studied Ancient Greek and oral literature for her undergraduate degree and went on to complete a PhD in comparative literature at Harvard University, where she was also a lecturer and fellow. She has served on the boards of educational nonprofits in both the United States and the European Union, and was a Daimler Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, reflecting a long-standing commitment to public education and intellectual exchange.

Across disciplines and formats, Leslie’s career circles core concerns over who gets to speak, who gets to listen, and what forces shape that exchange. Those questions sit squarely at the heart of FIRE’s mission, and we look forward to her contributions as we continue to defend and expand the space for open debate and creative expression in an increasingly surveilled and polarized world.