Dr. Vali Nasr, Professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University
Vali Nasr is Professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University, Senior Advisor at Kissinger Associates, Senior Fellow at Foreign Policy at Brookings Institution, and a columnist at Bloomberg View. He served as Senior Advisor to U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke between 2009 and 2011. He has previously served as Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and Senior Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
He is a specialist on political and social developments in the Muslim world and is the author of Forces of Fortune: The Rise of a New Middle Class and How it Will Change Our World (Free Press, 2009); The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam will Shape the Future (W.W. Norton, 2006); and Democracy in Iran: History and the Quest for Liberty (Oxford University Press, 2006); as well as a number of other books and numerous articles in academic journals and encyclopedias. His works have been translated into Arabic, French, German, Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Indonesian, Italian, Turkish, Persian, Chinese, Hindi and Urdu.
He has advised senior American policy makers, world leaders, and businesses including the President, Secretary of State, senior members of the Congress, and presidential campaigns, and has written for The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, The New Republic, Newsweek, Time, Christian Science Monitor, Financial Times, Foreign Policy, Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, and has provided frequent expert commentary to CNN, BBC, National Public Radio, Public Radio International, Newshour with Jim Lehrer, Frontline, ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, and has been a guest on the Charlie Rose Show and Meet the Press, Larry King Live, the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Colbert Report, Real Time with Bill Maher, GPS with Fareed Zakaria, and This Week with Christiane Amanpour. His interviews have appeared in Al-Hayat, Al-Sharq al-Awsat and Al-Jazeera in the Middle East, Der Spiegel and Die Welt in Germany, La Repubblica, La Stampa, and Corriera della Sera in Italy, El Mundo in Spain, and Le Monde in France, as well as in leading media outlets in Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Iran, Japan, Turkey, Sweden and Switzerland.
He is a member of Board of Trustees of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and National Democratic Institute; and has been the recipient of grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council. He is a Carnegie Scholar for 2006.
He received his BA from Tufts University in International Relations summa cum laude and was initiated into Phi Beta Kappa in 1983. He earned his masters from the Fletcher School of Law in and Diplomacy in international economics and Middle East studies in 1984, and his PhD from MIT in political science in 1991.
Dr. Randa Slim, Adjunct Research Fellow at the New America Foundation and scholar at the Middle East Institute
Randa Slim is a research fellow with the National Security Studies Program. A former vice president of the International Institute for Sustained Dialogue, Slim has also been a senior program advisor at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a guest scholar at the United States Institute of Peace, and a program officer at the Kettering Foundation.
She has consulted for a number of international and US governmental and private sector organizations including USAID, UNDP, and the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs. In the 1990s, she was involved in conflict prevention and management activities in Central Asia working in Tajikistan and the Ferghana Valley. Since 2001, Ms. Slim has developed and managed a number of Track II diplomatic activities in the Middle East including an Iraqi national reconciliation dialogue involving Iraqi parliamentarians, tribal leaders and representatives of Iraqi opposition groups. In 2007, she co-founded the Arab Network for the Study of Democracy, a group of academics and civil society activists from eight Arab countries. She is a board member of the International Institute for Sustained Dialogue and the Project on Middle East Democracy.
The author of several studies, book chapters and articles on mediation, conflict prevention, dialogue processes, and post-conflict peace building, she is currently completing a book manuscript about Hezbollah. Her writings have appeared in the Huffington Post and ForeignPolicy.com.
Ms. Slim earned her BS and MA degrees at the American University of Beirut and completed her PhD studies at the University of North Carolina.
Dr. Leila Fawaz, Issam M. Fares Professor of Lebanese and Eastern Mediterranean Studies, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy; Director, Fares Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies at Tufts University
Leila Fawaz is Issam M. Fares Professor of Lebanese and Eastern Mediterranean Studies and Founding Director of the Fares Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies at Tufts University. Between 1996 and 2001, she was Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Jackson College, and Associate Dean of the Faculty. Fawaz also served as chair of the Department of History at Tufts University. She holds a dual appointment as Professor of Diplomacy at The Fletcher School and Professor of History at Tufts University.
Fawaz has served as president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America and of the Alumni Association in North America of the American University of Beirut (AANA). As president of the AANA, she also served as ex-officio trustee on the American University of Beirut Board of Trustees. Her editorial posts have included the positions of general editor of the book series "History and Society of the Modern Middle East" at Columbia University Press, editor of the International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES), and editorial board positions with the American Historical Review, IJMES, the British Middle East Studies Association Review, and others.
Fawaz serves on the Governing Boards of Harvard University as an Overseer, and was elected to serve as President of the Overseers for 2011-12. A Carnegie Scholar (2008-10), she is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a member of the Comité Scientifique of the Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences de l'Homme at the Université de Provence. She was a member of the steering committee of the European Science Foundation, Strasbourg, France, for the Program on "Individual and Society in the Mediterranean Muslim World" (1994-99), a member of its planning committee (1993), and a member of its publications committee (1996-99). She also served on the Advisory Board of the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars (CIES) and chaired the CIES Fulbright Review Committee. At various times, she served on committees of the Social Science Research Council, the Steering Committee of the European Science Foundation, and as a delegate to the American Council of Learned Societies. She was a Visiting Scholar at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Politiques et Sociales, Paris, and Visiting Professor at the University of Provence, Aix-en-Provence.
Fawaz received a B.A. and an M.A. in History from the American University of Beirut (in 1967 and 1968, respectively), and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in History from Harvard University in 1979. Her research interests include the social and political history of the modern Middle East, including the Arab provinces of the
Ottoman Empire. Her publications include Transformed Landscapes: Essays on
Palestine and the Middle East in Honor of Walid Khalidi (co-editor, 2009);
Modernity and Culture: From the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean (co-editor,
2002); An Occasion for War: Ethnic Conflict in Mount Lebanon and Damascus in
1860 (1994); and Merchants and Migrants in Nineteenth-Century Beirut (1983). As
Carnegie Scholar and since, Fawaz is working next on a study of the experience
of World War I in the Middle East.