Middle East and North Africa Experts
Associate Professor of Middle East History and Chair of the Program of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, Brandeis University
Whereas my previous book, The Shi`is of Iraq, illuminated the socioreligious life and political inclinations of a single Shi`i community, the project that I will pursue at the Wilson Center expands the discussion beyond Iraq and explores what nationalism means for Shi`is in the Arab world. In taking this approach—and utilizing a rich Arabic Shi`i literature, government publications, and Brit...
Iraq correspondent, Financial Times
I have lived and worked as a journalist in the Arab world for the past 15 years. I moved to Egypt in 1993, and in 1997, I helped found the Cairo Times, which at the time was one of the region's few genuinely independent news magazines in any language. Throughout much of this time Egypt experienced a low-level Islamist insurgency, which caused significant casualties and economic damage before colla...
PhD Candidate, Dept of Political Science, Boston University
Erzen Oncel is a PhD candidate in the department of Political Science at Boston University. She received her BA degrees in History and International Relations & Political Science from Bogazici University, Istanbul. Her major field of study is Comparative Politics with a special interest in political elite, descriptive representation, and ethnic politics in the Middle East. From September 2008...
Middle East Specialist and Former Washington Post Correspondent
David B. Ottaway received a BA from Harvard, magna cum laude, in 1962 and a PhD from Columbia University in 1972. He worked 35 years for The Washington Post as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Africa and Southern Europe and later as a national security and investigative reporter in Washington before retiring in 2006. He has won numerous awards for his reporting at home and abroad and wa...
Marina Ottaway is a Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center and a long-time analyst of political transformations in Africa, the Balkans, and the Middle East. She is working on a project at the Wilson Center about the countries of the Arab Spring and Iraq. Ottaway joined the Wilson Center after 14 years at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, during which she played a central role in...
Adjunct Research Fellow, INSS-NDU
John W. Parker joined the Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Defense University in January 2010, transitioning to adjunct status in January 2013. From 1971-73, he worked for the U.S. Information Agency and was attached to the cultural exchange exhibit “R&D – USA” in the Soviet Union for all of 1972. From 1974-2010, he served in the U.S. Department of Sta...
Founder and President, National Iranian American Council and author of A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama's Policy with Iran
Correspondent at The Washington Post
Joshua Partlow is a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post. Between 2009 and 2012, he was the paper’s Kabul bureau chief. Before going to Afghanistan, he worked as the Post’s correspondent in South America, based in Rio de Janeiro, and as a correspondent in Iraq. Partlow joined The Washington Post in 2003. He was on the financial desk and later worked for the metro section cover...
Human Rights Activist; President of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, Bahrain.
Nabeel Rajab is president and co-founder of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and long-time crusader for human rights in the Kingdom of Bahrain. Rajab also currently serves as the deputy secretary general for the International Federation for Human Rights and as the chairperson of CARAM-Asia.Rajab was one of the first defenders of Bahraini human rights, and is credited with the foundation of the...