November 3, 2014

Joshua Landis is Director of the Center for Middle East Studies and Associate Professor at the University of Oklahoma’s College of international Studies.
He writes “Syria Comment”, a daily newsletter on Syrian politics that attracts some 50,000 readers a month. It is widely read by officials in Washington, Europe and Syria. Dr. Landis travels frequently to Washington DC to consult with government agencies and speak at think tanks. Most recently he has spoken at the Woodrow Wilson Institute, Brookings Institute, USIP, Middle East Institute, and Council on Foreign Relations.

He is a frequent analyst on TV and radio. Most recently he has appeared on PBS News Hour, the Charlie Rose Show, al-Jazeera, Frontline, NPR and BBC radio.

He is a frequently published in such journals as Foreign Policy, Middle East Policy, and Time Magazine. His most recent publications are:

• Stay Out of Syria – By Joshua Landis | JUNE 5, 2012 , Foreign Policy Foreign intervention to topple Bashar al-Assad’s bloody regime risks a fiasco on par with Iraq and Afghanistan.
• Why Asad Is Likely to Survive to 2013. Middle East Policy, (19:1 Spring 2012) pp 72-85.

He has won the best teacher prize at his university; raised over one million dollars for a new chair in Iranian studies, and helped bring the government funded Arabic Flagship Program to OU. Three Fulbright grants, the SSRC and other awards have helped support his research.

He was educated at Swarthmore (BA), Harvard (MA), and Princeton (PhD). He has lived over 14 years in the Middle East and speaks Arabic and French fluently. He has lived four years in Syria, most recently spending 2005 in Damascus as a Senior Fulbright Research Fellow and has returned most summers until the revolution began.

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.