Amy Austin Holmes is currently an International Affairs Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. She has a PhD from Johns Hopkins University, with expertise on US security relations and contentious politics in the Middle East and Europe. Dr. Holmes previously served as an Associate Professor of Sociology at the American University in Cairo, and has held Visiting Scholar positions at Harvard University and Brown University. A former Fulbright scholar in Germany, she is the author of Coups and Revolutions: Mass Mobilization, the Egyptian Military, and the United States from Mubarak to Sisi (Oxford University Press, 2019) and Social Unrest and American Military Bases in Turkey and Germany since 1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Having spent a decade living in the Middle East through the period of revolutionary upheaval, she has published numerous articles on Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Tunisia, and Bahrain. Professor Holmes is the first person to have conducted a field survey of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) based on numerous trips to all six provinces of Northeast Syria between 2015-2020. Her current research is about governance challenges of the semi-autonomous Kurdish-led region of northern Syria. This includes a focus on the protection of minority groups exposed to ethnic cleansing and forced displacement.
