Advisory Board

Qatar University’s 5th President Al-Misnad is one of Qatar’s leading educators, and a partner in many initiatives towards the fulfillment of national development strategies.  As a member of the Board of Directors of Qatar Foundation for Education Science and Community Development since 1999, she has had a key role in the governance and leadership of the educational institutions comprising Education City. Al-Misnad has written more than 50 articles published in professional journals and presented at leading conferences and seminars at the local, regional, and international levels.

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Rochelle Davis is an Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology in the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University, where she teaches courses on Arab society and culture, refugees, migrants and immigrants in and out of the Arab World, and war and conflict. Her academic research focuses on refugees and conflict, specifically, Palestinian, Syrian, and Iraqi refugees. She has conducted research in Jordan, Turkey, Iraq, and Lebanon. Her current research is based on 300 qualitative interviews conducted through participatory research by refugees in Jordan and Lebanon, and includes displaced Syrians, Iraqis, Palestinians, Sudanese, and Somalis.

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Suad Joseph is a scholar of Middle East gender and family studies. Her research has focused on the relationships between religion and politics, family and the state, gender and citizenship, children and rights, and culturally specific notions of selfhood. She has focused considerably on institution-building: She founded a group leading to the establishment of the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association; she founded the Association for Middle East Women’s Studies and co-founded its internationally recognized Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies; she founded the Arab Families Research Group; and a six-university consortium. She co-founded the Arab American Studies Association and the Association for Middle East Anthropology. She was the president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America, the main professional association for scholars of the Middle East. She co-founded the Women and Gender Studies Program and founded the Middle East/South Asia Studies Program at UC Davis. She was awarded the UC Davis Prize for Undergraduate Teaching and Research, the largest such prize in the United States. She was awarded the graduate mentor award by the Consortium for Women and Research. Her public service has been recognized: She was awarded the Diversity Leadership award and the Distinguished Scholarly Public Service Award by UC Davis. Her research has also been committed to supporting the research of colleagues. She is General Editor of the highly esteemed Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures, the first encyclopedia of its kind, which Choice, the magazine for librarians, ranked as “essential” for libraries. She has edited or co-edited eight books, and published over 100 articles. For the past decade and half, she has offered training in proposal writing and research design to young scholars in the Middle East, Europe, and the United States.

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Khouri is a Palestinian-Jordanian and US citizen whose family resides in Beirut and Nazareth. He is a former Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, as well as a columnist at the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper. He is an internationally syndicated political columnist and book author, and a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Dubai School of Government. He was the co-recipient of the Pax Christi International Peace Award for his efforts to bring peace and reconciliation to the Middle East. 

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Sir Lankester held senior positions in the British Treasury, was Britain’s representative on the boards of the IMF, World Bank and the European Investment Bank, and served as Permanent Secretary in Britain’s international aid and education ministries. He served as Private Secretary (Economic Affairs) to Prime Ministers Callaghan and Thatcher. He was Director of SOAS at the University of London and President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. In 2012, his book The Politics and Economics of Britain’s Foreign Aid: the Pergau Dam Affair was published by Routledge. He also Chairs the Board of Governors of Contemporary Dance Trust.

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Ellen Lust is the Founding Director of the Programs on Governance and Local Development at Yale University (est. 2013) and at the University of Gothenburg (est. 2015), and Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg. She received her M.A. in Modern Middle East and North African Studies (1993) and PhD in Political Science from the University of Michigan (1997). She held faculty positions at Rice University and Yale University, and was a visiting scholar at the Institute of Graduate Studies (Geneva, Switzerland) and the Straus Institute in the Law School at NYU. She has authored numerous books and articles, including most recently, Trust, Voice and Incentives: Learning from Local Successes in Service Delivery in the Middle East and North Africa (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2015) in collaboration with Hana Brixi and Michael Woolcock. Her current research is aimed at developing local governance indicators and examining the role of social institutions in governance. She was a co-founder of the Transitional Governance Project, a founding associate editor of Middle East Law and Governance, and has served as an advisor and consultant to such organizations as the Carter Center, Freedom House, NDI, UNDEF, UNDP, USAID, and the World Bank. Foundations such as the Moulay Hicham Foundation, National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council, FORMAS and the Swedish Research Council have supported her work.

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Clyde Wilcox is the interim dean of Georgetown University in Qatar.   He is a professor of Government at Georgetown University, where he has taught for nearly 35 years.  Since 2014 he has spent all or part of each academic year at the Doha campus.  Previously he was a statistician at the Federal Election Commission, and taught at Union College.  Wilcox writes on a variety of topics primarily in American and comparative politics, including religion and politics, gender politics, interest groups and social movements, money in politics, public opinion, electoral behavior, the politics of social issues such as abortion and LGBT rights, and science fiction and politics.  He has written or edited more than 30 books and hundreds of book chapters and journal articles.  He has lectured in a number of countries, and spoken to international visitors in State Department programs from more than 185 countries.  He has consulted with presidential campaigns, with trade associations, and with citizen groups.  He has trained diplomats in the US and in other countries.

He is the author or coauthor of God’s Warriors: The Christian Right in 20^th Century America, Between Two Absolutes: Public Opinion and the Politics of Abortion, Serious Money: Fundraising and Contributing in Presidential Nomination Campaigns, Interest Groups in American Campaigns: The New Face of Electioneering, and Federalism: A Very Short Introduction.  He is editor or coeditor of Understanding Public Opinion, The Changing Politics of Gun Control, The Politics of Gay Rights, Religion and Politics in Comparative Perspective: The One, the Few, and the Many, and Political Science Fiction.  He earned an MA and PhD from the Ohio State University, and a BA from West Virginia University.