Ziad Abu-Rish is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Ohio University. He is co-editor of The Dawn of the Arab Uprisings: End of An Older Order? (2012), and author of Protests, Regime Stability, and the History of Authoritarian State Formation in Jordan in the forthcoming edited volume Beyond the Arab Spring: The Evolving Ruling Bargain in the Middle East (2014).

In addition to his publications, Ziad serves as one of the senior editors of the Arab Studies Journal. Ziad is co-editor of Jadaliyya. His co-authored Jadaliyya articles can be found here.

Twitter: @ziadaburish

Maya Mikdashi received her PhD from Columbia University's Department of Anthropology. She is Co-Director of the documentary film About Baghdad. Maya is currently a Mellon Postdoctural Fellow at Rutgers University. She is Co-Founder/Editor of Jadaliyya.

Noura Erakat is an Assistant Professor at George Mason University where she teaches in the legal studies, international studies, and human rights/social justice studies concentrations. Her scholarly interests include humanitarian law, human rights law, refugee law, and national security law. She earned her BA and JD from Berkeley Law School and her LLM in National Security from the Georgetown University Law Center. She is a Co-Founder/Editor of Jadaliyya e-zine. Prior to beginning her appointment at GMU, Noura was a Freedman Teaching Fellow at Temple Law School and has has taught International Human Rights Law and the Middle East at Georgetown University since 2009. 

Upon completing law school, Noura received a New Voices Fellowship to develop a litigation unit aimed at redressing Palestinian human rights claims under the ATS in US federal courts. She went on to serve as Legal Counsel for a Congressional Subcommittee in the House of Representatives, chaired by Congressman Dennis J. Kucinich. In Spring 2010, Noura worked with a Lebanese human rights attorney to file habeus corpus petitions on behalf of Iraqi refugees detained by Lebanese authorities.Upon leaving Lebanon, she became the Legal Advocate for the Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Refugee and Residency Rights where she represented their claims before the Human Rights Council, human rights treaty bodies, among the UN diplomatic missions as well as among the US Administration and Congress. 

Her scholarly publications include: "U.S. vs. ICRC-Customary International Humanitarian Law and Universal Jurisdiction" in the Denver Journal of International Law & Policy, “New Imminence in the Time of Obama: The Impact of Targeted Killings on the Law of Self-Defense” in the Arizona Law Review, and "Overlapping Refugee Legal Regimes: Closing the Protection Gap During Secondary Forced Displacement," forthcoming in the Oxford Journal of International Refugee Law . Noura’s media appearances include MSNBC, Fox News, PBS NewsHour, BBC World Service, NPR, Democracy Now, and Al Jazeera. She has published in The Nation, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Huffington Post, IntlLawGrrls, The Hill, and Foreign Policy, among others. Noura is the co-editor with Mouin Rabbani of Aborted State? The UN Initiative and New Palestinian Junctures, an anthology related to the 2011 and 2012 Palestine bids for statehood at the UN. Twitter: @4noura

Aslı Bâli is Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law, Founding Faculty Director of the Promise Institute for Human Rights, and former Director of the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies. Her research focuses on public international law—including human rights and humanitarian law—and comparative constitutional law, with a focus on the Middle East. She co-chairs the Advisory Council for the Middle East and North Africa Division of Human Rights Watch and chairs the Middle East Studies Association Task Force on Civil and Human Rights and the MESA Global Academy.

Rana Barakat is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Museum at Birzeit University in Palestine. Her research interests include the history and historiography of colonialism, nationalism, and cultures of resistance. She has published in several venues including the Journal of Palestine Studies, Jerusalem Quarterly, Settler Colonial Studies, and Native American and Indigenous Studies. She has a book forthcoming with UNC Press titled Lifta and Resisting the Museumification of Palestine: Indigenous History of the Nakba, which advances an Indigenous understanding of time, space, and memory in Palestine by focusing on the details of the people and place of Lifta village over time. And her second book is in progress, The Buraq Revolt: Constructing a History of Resistance in Palestine, argues that this 1929 revolt was the first sign in the mandate period of sustained mass resistance to the settler-colonial project, including direct and rhetorical actions against both political Zionism and British imperialism, planting seeds of a century of mass political mobilization.

Rochelle Davis is the Director of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, part of the Walsh School of Foreign Service, at Georgetown University. Her main research is on forced migration, war, and conflict, particularly Palestinian, Syrian, and Iraqi refugees and internally displaced persons. Her first book, Palestinian Village Histories: Geographies of the Displaced (Stanford University Press, 2011), addresses how Palestinian refugees today write histories of their villages that were destroyed in the 1948 war, and the stories and commemorations of village life that are circulated in the diaspora. She is currently writing a book on the role of culture in the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

Davis is the lead qualitative researcher on the joint ISIM-IOM project, a 3-year longitudinal study of 4000 Iraqi families displaced by ISIS. She has published articles and reports on displaced Syrians, Sudanese and Somali refugees in Jordan, and is working on issues related to gender and vulnerability -- in particular, Syrian men faced with forced conscription into the Syrian army who choose to flee. For more of her publications, see her Georgetown website. 

Beshara Doumani is the Joukowsky Family Distinguished Professor of Modern Middle East History at Brown University. On July 1, 2020, he became the inaugural holder of the Mahmoud Darwish Professorship of Palestinian Studies, the first endowed chair dedicated to this field of study. His research focuses on peoples, places, and time periods erased or marginalized by mainstream scholarship on the early modern and modern Middle East. He also writes on academic freedom and the Palestinian condition. His books include Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, and Family Life in the Ottoman Mediterranean: A Social History. Doumani established the Center for Middle East Studies at Brown University, and is the founding director of New Directions in Palestinian Studies at Brown University. He is the editor of a book series on Palestinian studies with the University of California Press, co-editor of the Jerusalem Quarterly, and a member of the editorial committee of the Journal of Palestine Studies. He led a team that produced a strategic plan for the establishment of the Palestinian museum, and received the Sawyer Seminar award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for his proposal, “Displacement and the Making of the Modern World: Histories, Ecologies, and Subjectivities.” Doumani joined Brown after fourteen years at the University of California, Berkeley, and eight years at the University of Pennsylvania. He also taught at Birziet University. Doumani was a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University; and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton. He is currently working on a history of the Palestinians through the social life of stone.

Adel Iskandar is Assistant Professor of Global Communication at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. He is the author, coauthor, and editor of several works including Egypt In Flux: Essays on an Unfinished Revolution (AUCP/OUP), Al-Jazeera: The Story of the Network that is Rattling Governments and Redefining Modern Journalism (Basic Books), Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation (University of California Press), and Mediating the Arab Uprisings (Tadween Publishing). Iskandar's work deals with media, identity and politics and has lectured extensively on these topics at universities worldwide. His latest publication is the co-edited volume Media Evolution on the Eve of the Arab Spring (Palgrave Macmillan). Iskandar taught for several years at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and the Communication, Culture, and Technology program at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. He is a co-editor of Jadaliyya.

Lisa Wedeen is the Mary R. Morton Professor of Political Science and the College and co-director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (3CT) at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (1999), Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power, and Performance in Yemen (2008), and Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria (2019), which won the American Political Science Association’s Charles Taylor Book Award and the Middle East and North Africa Politics Section’s best book award.

Fida Adely is an Associate Professor at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and the Clovis and Hala Salaam Maksoud Chair in Arab Studies. She is also currently serving as the Academic Director for the Arab Studies program at Georgetown. Dr. Adely is an anthropologist and her research interests include education, labor, development, and gender in the Arab world. Her primary research site has been Jordan, although she teaches and writes about the Arab world more broadly.

Dr. Adely received her PhD in 2007 at Teachers College (Columbia University) in Comparative Education and Anthropology. She was previously a lecturer at Columbia University’s School for International and Public Affairs, as well as a visiting professor in the Department of International and Transcultural Studies at Teachers College/Columbia University.

Nadya Sbaiti specializes in the social and cultural histories of the modern Middle East. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled "Gender, Education, and Nation in Mandate Lebanon," (forthcoming), which examines the central role of education to the formation of multiple national narratives and the production of history in Lebanon under French mandate.

Additional research interests include spatial manifestations of colonial and national projects, colonial methods of social control through prisons and asylums, the production of history as both discursive and material practice, tourism and heritage, and contemporary popular culture (music, film, game shows and reality television).

Sbaiti has served as co-editor of the peer-reviewed Arab Studies Journal since 2005, and she helped produce the acclaimed documentary film About Baghdad (2004).

Lisa Wedeen is the Mary R. Morton Professor of Political Science and the Co-Director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory at the University of Chicago. She is also Associate Faculty in Anthropology and the Co-Editor of the University of Chicago Book Series, “Studies in Practices of Meaning.”

Her publications include three books: Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (1999; with a new preface, 2015); Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power and Performance in Yemen (2008); and Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria (2019). Among her articles are the following: “Conceptualizing ‘Culture’: Possibilities for Political Science” (2002); “Concepts and Commitments in the Study of Democracy” (2004), “Ethnography as an Interpretive Enterprise” (2009), “Reflections on Ethnographic Work in Political Science” (2010), “Ideology and Humor in Dark Times: Notes from Syria” (2013), and “Scientific Knowledge, Liberalism, and Empire: American Political Science in the Modern Middle East” (2016). She is the recipient of the David Collier Mid-Career Achievement Award and an NSF fellowship, and is currently completing an edited volume with Joseph Masco, entitled Conspiracy/Theory.