James Ryan is the executive director of the Middle East Research and Information Project. Previously, he served as the director of research and director of the Middle East Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and before that as the Associate Director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at New York University. Ryan is a historian by training whose work has focused on the history of dissent in Turkey from the late Ottoman period to the present. He frequently writes and comments on Turkish politics and US Foreign Policy in the Middle East, including for MERIP, and has authored several articles for academic journals on topics ranging from political trials in Cold War Turkey to Istanbul's mass transit infrastructure. He holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Pennsylvania.

Billie Jeanne Brownlee is Senior Lecturer in Middle East politics at the University of Exeter. She is the author of New Media and Revolution: Resistance and Dissent in pre-Uprising Syria (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2020) and States without People: Revolt and Defeat in the Middle East (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2025, co-authored with Maziyar Ghiabi). Her work explores the politics of media, displacement, social mobilisation, and political culture with focus on the nexus between local and global entanglements. She has carried out extensive fieldwork across the MENA region including in Syria, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, and Turkey and her research has been supported by the UKRI-ESRC Global Challenges Research Fellowship. Prior to joining Exeter, Billie Jeanne worked for the EEAS in Brussels, the Italian Development Cooperation Aid in Jerusalem, and at the Italian Embassy in Jerusalem.

Marya Hannun is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter and the Managing Editor of MERIP. Her research is on the history of women's movements in Afghanistan and transregional feminist organizing in the early 20th Century.

Michelle Woodward is the photo editor of MERIP, a position she has held since 2003. Previously she served as managing editor, media coordinator, administrative assistant and intern for MERIP. She holds an MS in Comparative Media Studies from MIT. A scholar of the history of photography and photojournalism in the Middle East, she has published in History of Photography, Photographies and Jerusalem Quarterly and the edited collection Film and Risk. While based in Beirut she was editor of Jadaliyya's Photography Page from 2012 until 2017.

Paul Silverstein is professor of anthropology at Reed College. He is the author of Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race, and Nation (Indiana University Press, 2004), Memory and Violence in the Middle East and North Africa, edited with Ussama Makdisi (Indiana University Press, 2006) and Postcolonial France: Race, Islam and the Future of the Republic (Pluto Press, 2018).

Muriam Haleh Davis is an associate professor in the history department at the University of California, Santa Cruz where she teaches classes on post-colonial North Africa, Arab thought and French empire. Her publications include Markets of Civilization: Islam and Racial Capitalism in Algeria (Duke University Press, 2022) and articles in The Journal of Modern History and The Journal of European Integration. She also co-edited North Africa and the Making of Europe: Governance, Institutions and Culture (Bloomsbury, 2018). In addition to MERIP, she also contributes to the Maghreb Page on Jadaliyya as a co-editor.

Lisa Hajjar is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her work focuses mainly on issues relating to law and conflict, specifically the enforcement of international human rights and humanitarian laws in the context of armed conflicts. Her research addresses military courts and occupations, torture and targeted killing. Her publications include Courting Conflict: The Israeli Military Court System in the West Bank and Gaza (University of California Press, 2005), Torture: A Sociology of Violence and Human Rights (Routledge 2013) and The War in Court: Inside the Long Fight against Torture (University of California Press, 2022).

Kaveh Ehsani is associate professor of international studies at DePaul University.

Adam Hanieh is professor of political economy and global development at IAIS, University of Exeter, and Joint Chair at the Institute of International and Area Studies (IIAS) at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. His research focuses on political economy, with an emphasis on the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council.

Vickie Langohr is associate professor at College of the Holy Cross. Her teaching and research interests are in Middle East politics, women's rights and democratization.

James Ryan is the executive director of MERIP.

Michael Hanna is the Director of US Programs at the International Crisis Group. He leads the organisation’s research, analysis, policy prescription and advocacy on U.S. foreign policy in conflict settings. Hanna works on issues of international security, international law, and U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and South Asia. He is also a non-resident senior fellow at the Reiss Center on Law and Security at New York University School of Law.

Mona Atia is Associate Professor of Geography and International Affairs and Director of the Institute for Middle East Studies and National Resource Center for Middle East Studies at The George Washington University. She is a critical development geographer whose areas of expertise include Islamic charity and finance, philanthropy and humanitarianism, housing/urban development, the production of poverty knowledge and the spatial politics of marginalization. She is author ofBuilding a House in Heaven: Pious Neoliberalism and Islamic Charity in Egypt(University of Minnesota Press, 2013) and her most recent work has appeared in the journals Antipode, Cities, Geography Compass, Middle East Report and Voluntas. She is currently working on a book manuscript based on research completed as part of a National Science Foundation CAREER award analyzing the production, use and impact of poverty mapping in Morocco and France. She is on the board of the American Institute for Maghrib Studies and served on the editorial board of the Middle East Report and Information Project (MERIP) from 2018-2024.

James Ketterer is a Senior Fellow at the Bard College Center for Civic Engagement, where he is teaching graduate seminars in the Master of Arts in Global Studies program. Until recently he was dean of the School of Continuing Education at the American University in Cairo. In that role, he was responsible for overseeing the arm of the University charged with public outreach and lifelong learning. Programs he oversaw included delivering educational offerings in languages and professional development, managing and presenting public programs in the performing and visual arts, working on programs supported by corporate and government sponsors and implementing lifelong learning programs for learners from all walks of life. He previously served as dean of international studies at Bard College and academic director of the Bard Globalization and International Affairs program and he taught in Bard’s Political Studies and Global and International Studies programs. He previously served as Egypt country director for AMIDEAST, a US educational and cultural affairs NGO.

Yaman Salahi is the founder of Salahi, PC a mission-driven law firm that pursues class action and individual litigation for social and economic justice. He has broad ranging experience with antitrust, consumer protection, civil rights and administrative law matters, including in complex class action proceedings and multi-district litigation, and is also interested in developing legal strategies for protecting academic freedom of expression on university campuses. Yaman graduated from Yale Law School and obtained a degree in rhetoric from UC Berkeley.

Sinem Adar is the head of the Centre for Applied Turkey Studies (CATS) of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP). Her work focuses on Turkish foreign and security policy, and domestic politics. Since 2024, she leads, with Muriel Asseburg, the working group entitled “Autocratization as a Challenge for German and European Foreign Policy” at the SWP. Adar holds a PhD from Brown University in the US and a Master's degree from the London School of Economics.

Samar Al-Bulushi is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. Her research lies at the intersection of feminist geopolitics, race, militarism, imperialism, and transnational solidarities, with a primary regional focus on East Africa and the Red Sea arena. Her book, War-Making as World-Making: Kenya, the United States, and the War on Terror (Stanford University Press, 2024), weaves together multiple scales of analysis, asking what a view from East Africa can tell us about the shifting configurations and expansive geographies of post 9/11 imperial warfare. Her work has been featured in a range of public outlets including Teen Vogue, the Intercept, Jacobin, and Africa is a Country.

Sabiha Allouche is a lecturer in the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter and works in the fields of Gender and Sexuality Studies and Middle East politics. While being primarily situated within feminist and queer studies, her work engages with feminist approaches to violence, conflict, migration and social mobility. She has published in International Journal of Middle East Studies, Journal of Middle East Women Studies and Women Studies Quarterly. She sits on the advisory board of Kohl: A Journal for Body and Gender Research and is a member of BRISMES' (British Society for Middle Eastern Studies) Council.

Lisa Bhungalia is an assistant professor of Geography and International Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and core faculty of the Middle East Studies Program. Their research examines evolving modalities of late-modern war, empire and transnational linkages between the US and Middle East. Their first book, Elastic Empire: Refashioning War through Aid in Palestine(Stanford University Press in 2024) traces the deepening entanglements of aid, law, and war in Palestine with attention to the surveillance and policing regimes produced through the embedding of counterterrorism laws and infrastructures into civilian aid flows. They are the recipient of the Middle East Studies Association 2024 Albert Hourani Book Award, the 2024 Palestine Academic Book Award, and the American Association of Geographers 2025 Glenda Laws Award. Their other published work has appeared in Politics and Space, Political Geography, Geopolitics, Small Wars & Insurgencies, Society and Space, and Middle East Report among other venues.

Stephen P. Gasteyer is an associate professor of sociology at Michigan State University. His research focuses on community development, environmental justice and the political ecology of landscape change. His recent research has addressed community approaches to food, water and sanitation access and water quality protection; settler colonialism, land grabs, technology and modes of resistance; and environmental equity, service delivery and the response to COVID-19 in Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey.

Maziyar Ghiabi is a senior lecturer in medical humanities and social sciences at the University of Exeter and the director of the Centre for Persian and Iranian Studies (CPIS) at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies (IAIS). Maziyar's first monograph, Drugs Politics: Managing Disorder in the Islamic Republic of Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2019), was awarded the MESA Nikki Keddie Award for best book on revolution, society and/or religion. He is the Principal Investigator of a Wellcome University Award on Living "addiction" in states of disruption: a transdisciplinary approach to drug consumption and recovery in the Middle East, 2021-2026. His second book, co-authored with Billie Jeanne Brownlee, is States without People (McGill-Queen’s University Press, under contract). In 2023, Maziyar was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize in Sociology and Social Work for his research.

Katharina Grueneisl is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Nottingham and an affiliated researcher at the Institut de Recherche sur le Maghreb Contemporain (IRMC) in Tunis. She is a geographer and ethnographer whose research focuses on labour, markets, and urban transformation in the Middle East and North Africa. Her work examines the global garment value chain, with fieldwork in Tunisia and Jordan, and has been published in MERIP, Environment and Planning A and E, Political Geography, Terrain, Suds, and REMMM. She works with participatory and cartographic methods at the intersection of spatial and artistic practice.

Kanwal Hameed is a college and departmental lecturer at Trinity College and the Faculty of History, University of Oxford, and an Arab Council of Social Sciences (ACSS) Early Career fellow. She is an interdisciplinary scholar of the modern Gulf, and its connections across multiple regions. Her research interests include anti-colonial histories and revolutionary political movements in the Gulf and MENA, historiography that attends to the intersecting axes of gender, class, ethno-sect, race and citizenship, and questions about the archives: on methodology and material.

Hatim El-Hibri is associate professor of film and media studies at George Mason University, where he is also affiliated with the program in Middle East and Islamic Studies. His first book is Visions of Beirut: The Urban Life of Media Infrastructure (Duke University Press, 2021).

Toby C. Jones is associate professor of history at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, where he teaches on the Middle East, environmental poltiics, and US empire. He is the author of Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia(Harvard University Press, 2010), Running Dry: Essays on Energy, Water, and Environmental Crisis (Rutgers University Press, 2015), and is writing a new book on the US, war and oil in the Persian Gulf for Verso.

Kendra Kintzi is an assistant professor in the department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Her research examines questions of decarbonization, digitalization and development, focusing on how energy infrastructures and environmental media are changing landscapes and livelihoods in Southwest Asia. Her work highlights how the architectures of climate mitigation are mediated through uneven urban environments and how evolving practices of social mobilization reveal alternative visions of collective climate futures. Her research has been published in Environment and Planning C, D and E, Political Geography, Sustainability Science, Antipode, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers and Big Data and Society.

Reinoud Leenders is a reader in international relations and Middle East studies in the War Studies Department at King’s College London. His research interests and teaching focus on Middle East politics generally and Syria, Lebanon and Iraq in particular. His work deals with the political economy of corruption, authoritarian governance, refugee issues, and conflict. He is the author of many journal articles and the book Spoils of Truce: Corruption and State-Building in Postwar Lebanon (Cornell University Press, 2012).

Rima Majed is an associate professor of sociology at the Sociology, Anthropology and Media Studies Department at the American University of Beirut (AUB). Her work focuses on the fields of social movements, uprisings, sectarianism, conflict and violence, with a focus on the Middle East. Dr. Majed was a visiting fellow at Princeton University in 2018/19, and a research fellow at Harvard University in 2022/23. Her work has appeared in several journals, books and media platforms such as American Political Science Review, Social Forces, British Journal of Sociology, Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of the Middle East, Middle East Law and Governance Journal, Routledge Handbook on the Politics of the Middle East, Global Dialogue, Idafat: The Arab Journal of Sociology, OpenDemocracy, Middle East Eye, CNN and Al Jazeera English. She is also the co-editor of The Lebanon Uprising of 2019: Voices from the Revolution (I.B. Tauris, 2022), and the Principal Investigator on the “Critical Approaches to Development Studies in the Middle East and North Africa" project at the American University of Beirut (Lebanon). 

Pascal Menoret is the Khalid bin Abdullah Al Saud Professor in the Study of the Contemporary Arab World at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Joyriding in Riyadh: Oil, Urbanism, and Road Revolt (Cambridge University Press 2014) and Graveyard of Clerics: Everyday Activism in Saudi Arabia (Stanford University Press 2020).

Ali H. Musleh is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California, Davis. He received a PhD in Political Science from the University of Hawaii at Mānoa in 2022. From 2023-2025, he was the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Fellow at Columbia University’s Center for Palestine Studies. His research explores how contemporary forms of war shape the worlds we inhabit through questions of media, design, technology, embodiment, and aesthetics. His book project To What Abyss Does This Robot Take the Earth forays into the warscapes of Palestine where drones, autonomous weapons, and artificial intelligences permeate the terrains of the everyday as pervasive objects that differentially materialize Palestinian and Jewish-Israeli life and mediate them to the global world.

Hesham Sallam is a senior research scholar and the associate director for research at Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and serves as the associate director of the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy. He is also a co-editor of Jadaliyya ezine. His research focuses on Islamist movements and the politics of economic reform in the Arab World. He is author of Classless Politics: Islamist Movements, the Left, and Authoritarian Legacies in Egypt (Columbia University Press, 2022), co-editor of Struggles for Political Change in the Arab World (University of Michigan Press, 2022) and editor of Egypt's Parliamentary Elections 2011-2012: A Critical Guide to a Changing Political Arena (Tadween Publishing, 2013).

Kevin L. Schwartz is deputy director at the Oriental Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague where he focuses on Iran. He was previously a research fellow at the Library of Congress and distinguished visiting professor (Middle East chair) at the US Naval Academy. His writing on Iran, US foreign policy and the politics and societies of the Middle East has appeared in Al Jazeera, The Hill and The New Arab. Recent publications include Remapping Persian Literary History, 1700-1900 (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), “Visual Propaganda at a Crossroads: New Techniques at Iran’s Vali Asr Billboard” (Visual Studies, 2021) and “Citizen Martyrs: The Afghan Fatemiyoun Brigade in Iran” (Afghanistan, 2022). His current research explores how government and government-affiliated actors in Iran use visual iconography and digital media to represent and circulate regime ideology and narrativize the history and culture of the Islamic Republic. He holds a PhD in Near Eastern Studies from the University of California, Berkeley.

Deen Sharp is an LSE Fellow in Human Geography in the department of geography and environment at the London School of Economics. He was previously a post-doctoral fellow at the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the co-director of Terreform, Center for Advanced Urban Research. He is the co-editor of Beyond the Square: Urbanism and the Arab Uprisings (Urban Research, 2016) and Open Gaza (American University in Cairo Press and Terreform, 2021).

Jillian Schwedler is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York’s Hunter College and The Graduate Center. Her work focuses on cities, protests, policing, contentious politics, and political geography, with regional expertise on Jordan and Yemen. Her books include the award-winning Faith in Moderation: Islamist Parties in Jordan and Yemen (2006), Policing and Prisons in the Middle East (with Laleh Khalili) (2010), Protesting Jordan: Geographies of Power and Dissent (2022), and The Political Science of the Middle East (with Marc Lynch and Sean Yom) (2022).

Maya Wind is a President’s and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Riverside and a fellow at the Freedom and Justice Institute of Scholars for Social Justice. Her publications include Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom (Verso 2024) and articles in Cultural Anthropology and South Atlantic Quarterly on the imbrication of universities in colonial violence. 

Sean Yom is an associate professor of political science at Temple University. His research encompasses the study of authoritarian politics, political economy, and US foreign policy, with a particular emphasis on the Arab monarchies. His publications include From Resilience to Revolution: How Foreign Interventions Destabilize the Middle East (Columbia University Press, 2016), The Political Science of the Middle East: Theory and Research since the Arab Uprisings, coedited with Marc Lynch and Jillian Schwedler (Oxford University Press, 2022) and essays in journals like Middle East Journal, European Journal of International Relations, Comparative Political Studies and Journal of Democracy.