Fouad Ajami

Majid Khadduri Professor of Middle East Studies, The John Hopkins University

Fouad Ajami is a Lebanese-born American academic and writer on Middle Eastern issues. He is Director of the Middle East Studies Program at the Paul H Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at The John Hopkins University, and has written extensively on US-Arab relations. His research has charted the road to 9/11, the Iraq war, and the American presence in the Arab-Islamic world. He is a member of the editorial board of Foreign Affairs.

Raised in a rural hamlet in southern Lebanon, Ajami moved to the United States to take up an undergraduate position at Eastern Oregon University, Oregon, before moving to the University of Washington, where he wrote his thesis on international relations and world government. After joining the political science department at Princeton University, Ajami found tenure as the Majid Khadduri professor of Middle East Studies at The John Hopkins University in 1980. A former advisor to United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, his writings include nearly four hundred essays, reviews, and columns of opinion on Arab and Islamic politics, American foreign policy, and contemporary international history.

Ajami is a contributing editor of US News & World Report, and frequently contributes to The New York Times Book Review, Foreign Affairs, The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal on Middle Eastern issues and contemporary international history. He is the author of The Arab Predicament (1992), The Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation’s Odyssey (1998), The Foreigner's Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq (2006), and other books. Ajami was granted the five-year MacArthur Prize Fellowship in 1982, received the Bradley Prize for Outstanding Achievement in 2002, and was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2006. He is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and co-chair of the Working Group on Islamism and the International Order.