Fawaz A. Gerges holds the Christian A. Johnson Chair in Middle Eastern Studies and International Affairs at Sarah Lawrence College. He earned a doctorate from Oxford University and MA from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Gerges is author of two recently acclaimed books: Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy (Harcourt Press, 2007), and The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global (Cambridge University Press, 2005). The Washington Post selected The Far Enemy as one of the best 15 books published in the field. Journey of the Jihadist was on the best-selling list of Barnes and Nobles and Foreign Affairs Magazine for several months.
No armchair historian, Gerges was recently a Carnegie Scholar, who has just returned from the Middle East after completing a fifteen-month field study in the region. He has interviewed hundreds of civil society leaders, activists, and mainstream and radical Islamists in the Muslim world and within Muslim communities in Europe.
Now he is working on two books. The first is tentatively titled “Genealogy of Revolutionary Islam.” The other is “Understanding Arab Politics: From Nasser To Nasrallah.”
His articles and editorials have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Christian Science Monitor, International Herald Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, The Independent (London), Al Hayat (London), Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Middle East Journal, Survival, Al Mustqbal al-Arabi, Middle East Insight, and many others.
Gerges has given scores of interviews for various media outlets throughout the world, including ABC, CNN, BBC, PBS, CBS, NPR, CBC, Al Jazeera, and LBC. He has been a guest on The Charlie Rose Show, The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Bill Moyers Journal, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, ABC Nightline, World News Tonight, This Week, Good Morning America and other prominent shows. He was a senior ABC television news analyst from 2000 until 2006, when he left to reside in the Middle East as a Carnegie
Scholar.
His special interests include Islam and the political process, Islamist and jihadist movements, Arab politics, Muslim politics, state and society in the Middle East, American foreign policy towards the Muslim world, the modern history of the Middle East, the Arab-Israeli conflict, history of conflict, diplomacy and foreign policy, and historical sociology. Gerges has taught at Oxford, Harvard, and Columbia, and was a research scholar at Princeton for two years.
Gerges has been the recipient of a MacArthur, Fullbright and Carnegie Fellowships and his books, including America and Political Islam: Clash of Cultures or Clash of Interests? (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and The Superpowers and the Middle East: Regional and International Politics (Oxford and Westview), have been translated into a number of foreign languages.