Professor Joshua M. Landis, Ph.D.

Joshua Landis is the director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma and Associate Professor of Middle East studies at the University of Oklahoma’s School of international and Area Studies. He writes Syria Comment, a daily newsletter on Syrian politics that is widely consulted by officials in Washington, Europe, and Syria, and read by over 3,000 people daily.

He is a frequent analyst on TV and radio, having recently appeared on the PBS News Hour, the Charlie Rose Show, al-Jazeera, NPR, and the BBC. Last year, he was quoted in over 100 news stories, including in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, LA Times, and Times Magazine. His book, Democracy in Syria, will appear in the coming year, and he is author of numerous articles.

He was educated at Princeton (PhD), Harvard (MA), and Swarthmore (BA). He has lived over 14 years in the Middle East; having been brought up in Beirut, he returned to the region in the 1980s to teach in Beirut and study at universities in Damascus, Cairo, and Istanbul. Most recently, he spent 2005 in Syria as a Senior Fulbright Research Fellow and lived several months in Damascus in 2007.

He teaches: Political Islam, International Relations in the Middle East, Islam, The Modern Middle East, Culture and Society in the Middle East, the US in the Middle East and other courses.

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