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.

Ayça Alemdaroğlu is the associate director of the program on Turkey and research scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. She is a political sociologist, focusing on social and political inequality and change in Turkey and the Middle East. Ayça’s recent work examines youth politics, and authoritarianism. In “Governing the youth in times of dissent: Essay competitions, politics of history and affective pedagogies” (forthcoming), she examines the politics of history and emotional tactics the Justice and Development Party (AKP) uses in its effort to control, administer and recruit youth.

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.

Gregory Brew is a visiting scholar at the Jackson School of Global Affairs at Yale University and a historian of oil, US-Iranian relations, and the Cold War. His research explores the connections between the global political economy of oil, geopolitics and international relations and petro-state development in the modern Middle East. His work includes Petroleum and Progress in Iran: Oil, Development, and the Cold War (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and The Struggle for Iran: Oil, Autocracy, and the Cold War, 1951-1954 (University of North Carolina Press, 2023). He regularly comments on contemporary issues of energy and geopolitics. Find him on Twitter: @gbrew24

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.

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).

Kanwal Hameed is a research fellow for the Mapping Connections (China-Middle East Relations) at the IAIS, University of Exeter, and a teaching fellow in the department of Politics at SOAS. In April she will join the IASH at Edinburgh University as part of the first cohort of the Stuart Hall foundation RACE-Ed fellows. Her publications include, “Where Are the Revolutionary Women of West Asia and North Africa?” co-authored with Sara Salem in She Who Struggles: Revolutionary Women Who Shaped The World (Pluto Press: 2023), “One Struggle, Many Fronts: The National Union of Kuwaiti Students and Palestine”, in International Solidarity with the Palestinian Revolution (1965-1982) (IB Tauris: 2023) and “Toward a liberation pedagogy” co-authored with Katie Natanel and Amal Khalaf in Kohl. Kanwal has also written for the Archive Stories project, LSE Middle East Centre Blog and (forthcoming) for the ‘Solidarities Across Borders’ series by the History Workshop digital magazine.

Najib Hourani is an associate professor of anthropology and holds a joint appointment with the Graduate Global Urban Studies Program. He received his BA in political science and an MA in Middle East and North African studies from the University of Michigan. Hourani has published extensively on the post-conflict reconstruction of Beirut following the Lebanese Civil War and the 2006 Summer War. In addition he has explored “market driven” urban development and redevelopment in Amman, Jordan.

Laleh Khalili is a professor of Gulf Studies at the University of Exeter. She is the author or editor of six volumes, including most recently, Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula (Verso 2020) and The Corporeal Life of Seafaring (Mack Books 2024). She is also one of the co-editors of the Middle East series at the Stanford University Press.

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).

Shana Marshall is associate director of the Institute for Middle East Studies at the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. She earned her PhD in international relations and comparative politics of the Middle East at the University of Maryland in 2012. Her research focuses on the political economy of the military in Egypt, Jordan and the UAE. She has written for Middle East Report (MER), the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Jadaliyya and the Carnegie Middle East Center.

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).

Jacob Mundy is an associate professor at Colgate University and was a Fulbright Scholar with the Université de Tunis in 2018–2019. He is the author of Imaginative Geographies of Algerian Violence (Stanford University Press, 2015) and Libya (Polity Press, 2018).

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).

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.