Michael Doran is a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He specializes in Middle East security issues. In the administration of President George W. Bush, Doran served in the White House as a senior director in the National Security Council, where he was responsible for helping to devise and coordinate United States strategies on a variety of Middle East issues, including Arab-Israeli relations and U.S. efforts to contain Iran and Syria. He also served in the Bush administration as a senior advisor in the State Department and a deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Pentagon. Born in Kokomo, Indiana, Doran went to elementary school in Carmel, outside of Indianapolis, before his family moved to Fullerton, California, where he graduated from Sunny Hills High School. He received a B.A. from Stanford and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton. Before coming to Hudson, Doran was a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He has also held teaching positions at NYU, Princeton, and the University of Central Florida. He is the author of Pan-Arabism before Nasser, which analyzes the first Arab-Israeli war as an inter-Arab conflict, and is now completing a book for Simon and Schuster about President Eisenhower and the Middle East. He appears frequently on television, and has published extensively in Foreign Affairs, The American Interest, Commentary, Mosaic Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.

Madhawi Al-Rasheed is Visiting Research Professor at the Middle East Institute at National University of Singapore (2016). She was Professor of Anthropology of Religion at King’s College, London (1994-2013). Before joining MEI, she was Visiting Professor at the Middle East Centre, London School of Economics. Professor Al-Rasheed specializes in the history, politics and society in Saudi Arabia. Her interdisciplinary research includes focus on Christian minorities in Iraq, Arab migration to London, Gulf transnational connections, gender relations in Saudi Arabia, and the Islamist movement. She has published widely on Saudi Arabia: Muted Modernists: the Struggle over Divine Politics in Saudi Arabia, London: Hurst 7 Co. & Oxford University Press 2015. M. A Most Masculine State: Gender, Politics and Religion in Saudi Arabia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2013 A History of Saudi Arabia, Second Edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2010. Contesting the Saudi State: Islamic Voices from a New Generation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007. Mazaq Al-islah fi al-Saudiyyah fi al-Qarn al-Wahid wa al-Ishrin, London: al-Saqi 2005. Iraqi Assyrian Christians in London: the Construction of Ethnicity, New York: the Edwin Mellen Press 1998. Politics in an Arabian Oasis: the Rashidi Tribal Dynasty, London: I.B. Tauris 1991. At MEI, Al-Rasheed is working on a new research project on the resilience of monarchy in Saudi Arabia in the context of the Arab uprisings in 2011.
Elvin Lim is author of The Lovers’ Quarrel: The Two Foundings & American Political Development (OUP, 2014) and The Anti-Intellectual Presidency: The Decline of Rhetoric from George Washington to George W. Bush (OUP, 2008). His research has been cited in Bloomberg, The Boston Globe, Forbes, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, NPR, National Journal, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The San Francisco Examiner, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, USA Today, and other venues. He read for a B.A. (First Class) in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Oxford, where he was Scholar at Christ Church, awarded the Sara Norton Thesis Prize, and also completed his D. Phil in Politics. He was awarded the Presidency Research Fellowship and Founders’ Award of the Presidency and Executive Politics Section of the American Political Science Association, and NUS’s Annual Teaching Excellence Award in 2016.

Moderator: 

Juan E. Campo is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at UC Santa Barbara and Director of the UCSB Education Abroad Program.  He specializes in the comparative study of Islam, particularly in the Middle East and South Asia, with an emphasis on sacred space, pilgrimage, popular religious practices, and political Islam. His most recent book is the Encyclopedia of Islam, a one-volume reference work intended for students and the general public. It received a “Best of Reference” award from the New York Public Library in 2010.  He is also the author of The Other Sides of Paradise:  Explorations in the Religious Meanings of Domestic Space in Islam, which won the American Academy of Religion’s Award for Excellence in 1991.  He has published articles on the hajj, death and afterlife beliefs and practices in Islam, Middle Eastern culinary cultures, and issues in contemporary Islam in edited volumes and reference works, including the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic World, Brill’s Encyclopedia of the Qur’an, and the Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim World.  He is currently writing a book about modern Muslim, Hindu, and Christian mass pilgrimages in comparative perspective.