Lisa Anderson is Special Lecturer and James T. Shotwell Professor of International Relations Emerita at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. Dr. Anderson served as President of the American University in Cairo for five years, from 2011-2016. Prior to her appointment as President, she was the University’s provost, a position she had assumed in 2008. She is Dean Emerita of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia, where she led the school from 1997-2007. She was on the faculty of Columbia since 1986; prior to her appointment as Dean, she served as Chair of the Political Science Department and Director of Columbia's Middle East Institute; she held the Shotwell Chair in the Political Science Department.  She has also taught at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School and in the Government and Social Studies departments at Harvard University. Dr. Anderson’s scholarly research has included work on state formation in the Middle East and North Africa; on regime change and democratization in developing countries; and on social science, academic research and public policy both in the United States and around the world. 

Daniel Brumberg is an Associate Professor of Government at Georgetown University and  Director of Democracy and Governance Studies at Georgetown University. Formerly a Special Adviser at  the United States Institute of Peace , he is also a Senior Fellow at the Project on Middle East Democracy and has taught as a Visiting Professor and Visiting Professor of Kuwait/Gulf Studies at Science Po in Paris. Prior to coming to Georgetown University he was a Visiting Professor in the Department of Political Science at Emory University, a Visiting Fellow in the Middle East Program in the Jimmy Carter Center, and a Lecturer at  the University of Chicago's Social Science Masters Program. Brumberg has published seminal articles on dynamics of political, social and economic change in the Middle East and wider Muslim World. His articles have appeared in leading print and on-line journals including the Journal o f Democracy, foreignpolicy.com  and theatlantic.com.  His books include Reinventing Khomeini, The Struggle for Reform in Iran, (University of Chicago Press), and Identity and Reform in the Muslim World, Challenges for US Engagement (USIP Press), co-edited with Dinah Shehata, and most recently, Power and Political Change in Iran, (co-edited with Farideh Farhi and published by Indiana University Press, 2016). 

Steven A. Cook is Eni Enrico Mattei senior fellow for Middle East and Africa studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). He is an expert on Arab and Turkish politics as well as U.S.-Middle East policy. Cook is the author of False Dawn: Protest, Democracy, and Violence in the New Middle East; The Struggle for Egypt: From Nasser to Tahrir Square, (winner of Washington Institute for Near East Policy's gold medal, 2012; and Ruling But Not Governing: The Military and Political Development in Egypt, Algeria, and Turkey (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2007).

Michele Dunne is the director and a senior fellow in Carnegie’s Middle East Program, where her research focuses on political and economic change in Arab countries, particularly Egypt, as well as U.S. policy in the Middle East. She was the founding director of the Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East at the Atlantic Council from 2011 to 2013 and was a senior associate and editor of the Arab Reform Bulletin at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace from 2006 to 2011. Dunne was a Middle East specialist at the U.S. Department of State from 1986 to 2003, where she served in assignments that included the National Security Council, the Secretary’s Policy Planning Staff, the U.S. embassy in Cairo, the U.S. consulate general in Jerusalem, and the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. She also served as a visiting professor of Arabic language and Arab studies at Georgetown from 2003 to 2006.

Noura Erakat is a human rights attorney and an Assistant Professor at George Mason University’s School of Integrative Studies. Her research interests include humanitarian law, refugee law, national security law, and critical race theory. Noura is the author of Justice for Some: Law As Politics in the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, forthcoming, 2019). She is a Co-Founding Editor of Jadaliyya e-zine and an Editorial Committee member of the Journal of Palestine Studies. Prior to joining GMU's faculty, she served as Legal Counsel for a Congressional Subcommittee in the House of Representatives, as a Legal Advocate for the Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Refugee and Residency Rights, and as the national grassroots organizer and legal advocate at the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation. Noura is the coeditor of Aborted State? The UN Initiative and New Palestinian Junctures, an anthology related to the 2011and 2012 Palestine bids for statehood at the UN. More recently, Noura released a pedagogical project on the Gaza Strip and Palestine, which includes a short multimedia documentary, Gaza In Context, that rehabilitates Israel’s wars on Gaza within a settler-colonial framework. She is also the producer of the short video, Black Palestinian Solidarity. 

Justin Gest is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government. He studies immigration and the politics of demographic change. He is the author of four books: Apart: Alienated and Engaged Muslims in the West (Oxford University Press/Hurst 2010); The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality (Oxford University Press 2016); The White Working Class: What Everyone Needs to Know(Oxford University Press 2018); and Crossroads: Comparative Immigration Regimes in a World of Demographic Change (Cambridge University Press 2018). He has authored over many peer-reviewed articles, and provided analysis for BBC, CNN, The Guardian, Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, NPR, Politico, Reuters, Vox, and The Washington Post. 

Jack A. Goldstone (Ph.D. Harvard University, 1981) is the Virginia E. and John T. Hazel, Jr. Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University, and a Global Policy Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Center.  Previously, Dr. Goldstone was on the faculty of Northwestern University and the University of California, and he has been a visiting scholar at Cambridge University, UCLA, UC-San Diego and the California Institute of Technology, as well as director of research institutes at the Russian Academy of National Economy (Moscow) and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.  He has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study at Stanford University, a distinguished lecturer at the American Academy in Berlin, and won Fellowships from the J.S. Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies.  He is the author of the classic work in historical sociology Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World, awarded the 1993 Distinguished Scholarly Research Award of the American Sociological Association and republished in a revised 25^th Anniversary Edition last year. His current research focuses on conditions for building democracy and stability in developing nations, the impact of population change on the global economy and international security, and the cultural origins of modern economic growth.

Bassam Haddad is Director of the Middle East and Islamic Studies Program and Associate Professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. He is the author of Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience (Stanford University Press, 2011). Bassam serves as Founding Editor of the Arab Studies Journal and the Knowledge Production Project. He is co-producer/director of the award-winning documentary film, About Baghdad, and director of the series Arabs and Terrorism. Bassam is Co-Founder/Editor of Jadaliyya Ezine and Executive Director of the Arab Studies Institute. He serves on the Board of Trustees at the Arab Council for the Social Sciences and is Executive Producer of Status Audio Magazine. Bassam is Co-Project Manager for the Salon Syria Project and Editor of Tadween Publishing.

Marc Lynch is Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at the George Washington University and director of the Project on Middle East Political Science.  He is a non-resident senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,  a contributing editor to the Monkey Cage political science blog on the Washington Post, and a 2016 Andrew Carnegie Fellow.  His books include Voices of the New Arab Public (2007); The Arab Uprisings (2012); The Arab Uprisings Explained (2014); and The New Arab Wars (2016). He is currently completing a book on the legacies of violence and political failure after the Arab Uprisings.

Dr. Peter Mandaville is Professor of International Affairs in the Schar School of Policy & Government at George Mason University and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, both in Washington DC. From 2015-16 he served as a Senior Advisor in the Secretary of State’s Office of Religion & Global Affairs where he served as the U.S. Department of State’s primary subject matter expert on Islam. From 2011-12 he was a member of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff where his work focused on the U.S. response to the Arab Uprisings. He is the author of the books Islam & Politics (2^nd edition, 2014) and Transnational Muslim Politics: Reimagining the Umma (2001) in addition to several co-edited books, many journal articles, book chapters, and op-ed/commentary pieces in outlets such as the International Herald Tribune, The Guardian, The Atlantic and Foreign Policy. He has testified multiple times before the U.S. Congress on topics including political Islam and human rights in the Middle East. His research has been supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Henry Luce Foundation.

Mark J. Rozell is the Founding Dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. He holds the Ruth D. and John T. Hazel chair in public policy. He is the author of nine books and editor of twenty additional books on various topics in US government and politics, including the Presidency, religion and politics, media and politics, and interest groups in elections. His latest book, Catholics and US Politics After the 2016 Elections: Understanding the “Swing Vote,” was published in 2017. He has testified before Congress on executive privilege issues and has lectured extensively in the US and abroad. In recent years, he has lectured in Austria, China, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, India, Italy, Poland, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, and Vietnam. Rozell writes frequent opinion columns for major media outlets such as The Hill, New York Daily News, and Politico. He is often asked to commentabout his areas of expertise for television and in publications such as The Washington Post and Time Magazine. He currently serves as a Judge for the Gerald R. Ford Award Committee for Outstanding Reporting on the Presidency for the Gerald R. Ford Foundation.

Paul Salem is senior vice president for policy research and programs at The Middle East Institute. He focuses on issues of political change, transition, and conflict as well as the regional and international relations of the Middle East.  He has a particular emphasis on the countries of the Levant and Egypt. Salem writes regularly in the Arab and Western press and has been published in numerous journals and newspapers. Salem is the author and editor of a number of books and reports including From Chaos to Cooperation: Toward Regional Order in the Middle East (ed. with Ross Harrison, 2017), Broken Orders: The Causes and Consequences of the Arab Uprisings (In Arabic, 2013), “The Recurring Rise and Fall of Political Islam” (CSIS, 2015), “The Middle East in 2015 and Beyond: Trends and Drivers” (MEI 2014), Bitter Legacy: Ideology and Politics in the Arab World (1994), Conflict Resolution in the Arab World (ed., 1997). Prior to joining MEI, Salem was the founding director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, Lebanon between 2006 and 2013.  From 1999 to 2006, he was director of the Fares Foundation and in 1989-1999 founded and directed the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies, Lebanon's leading public policy think tank.  Salem is also a musician and composer of Arabic-Brazilian jazz. His music can be found on iTunes.

 Nadya Sbaiti is Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies (CAMES) at the American University of Beirut. She earned both her MA in Arab Studies and her PhD in History from Georgetown University. She specializes in the social and cultural histories of the modern Middle East, with research foci that include education, gender, colonialism and and nationalism, and the histories of tourism and consumption. She is currently completing a book manuscript, Pedagogical Constituencies and Communities of Knowledge: Gender and Education in Mandate Lebanon, which explores the politics of community in interwar Lebanon through the lens of gendered education and the production of historical narratives. She is the author of a number of journal articles and book chapters, and has co-authored guides for conducting archival research in Lebanon. Since 2016, she co-directs the Lebanon Dissertation Summer Institute. She has served as co-editor of the peer-reviewed academic publication the Arab Studies Journal and is a co-founder and a co-editor of the e-zine www.Jadaliyya.com.

Dr. Jillian Schwedler is Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York’s Hunter College and the Graduate Center, and Nonresident Senior Fellow of the Rafiq Hariri Center for the Middle East at the Atlantic Council. She is member of the Board of Directors of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) of North America.  She is member of the editorial committees for the International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES) and Middle East Law and Governance (MELG), and member of the Board of Directors and the Editorial Committee of the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP), publishers of the quarterly Middle East Report. Dr. Schwedler’s books include the award-winning Faith in Moderation: Islamist Parties in Jordan and Yemen (Cambridge 2006) and (with Laleh Khalili) Policing and Prisons in the Middle East (Columbia 2010).  Her articles have appeared in World Politics, Comparative Politics, Middle East Policy, Middle East Report, Middle East Critique, Journal of Democracy, and Social Movement Studies, among many others. She is currently finalizing a book manuscript titled Protesting Jordan: Contentious Time and Space.