Asef Bayat is Professor of Sociology and Middle East Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His books include Workers and Revolution in Iran (Zed Books, 1987), Street Politics: Poor Peoples’ Movements in Iran (Columbia University Press, 1997), Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn (Stanford University Press, 2007), Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2010), and Being Young and Muslim: New Cultural Politics in the Global South and North (co-edited with L. Herrera, Oxford University Press, 2010).
Hossam Bahgat is the founder and director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), a Cairo-based independent human rights organization established in 2002 to promote and defend the rights to privacy, health, religious freedom, and bodily integrity, through research, advocacy, and strategic litigation. Bahgat is also the vice president of the Egyptian Association Against Torture, an Advisory Board member of the New Woman Foundation and a Steering Committee member of Sexuality Policy Watch.
Joel Beinin is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor in History and Professor of Middle Eastern History at Stanford University. From 2006 to 2008 he served as Director of Middle East Studies and Professor of History at the American University in Cairo. In 2001–02 he served as president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America. His recent books include The Struggle for Worker Rights in Egypt (Solidarity Center, 2010); Social Movements, Mobilization, and Contestation in the Middle East and North Africa (Stanford University Press, 2011), co-edited with Frédéric Vairel; and Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Ray Bush is Professor of African Studies and Development Politics at the University of Leeds, UK. His research focuses on the political economy of Africa and the Near East. His recent book is Poverty and Neoliberalism: Persistence and Reproduction in the Global South (Pluto Press, 2007), and editor with Habib Ayeb, Marginality in Egypt and the Middle East (Zed Books, 2012). He is deputy chair of The Review of African Political Economy.
Elliott Colla is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University. The author of Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity (Duke University Press, 2007), he has translated a number of works of Arabic literature, including Ibrahim Al-Koni’s Gold Dust (Arabia Books, 2008).
Eric Denis is Senior Researcher in Geography at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France. He is presently heading the Department of Social Sciences at the French Institute of Pondicherry (India), and formerly directed the Urban Observatory of Cairo at CEDEJ research center in Egypt (1997–2002). His publications focus upon metropolitan and real estate dynamics, illegal settlements, and access to services in Egypt, Sudan, and India.
Issandr El Amrani is a Cairo-based writer and consultant. His reporting and commentary on the Middle East and North Africa has appeared in The Economist, London Review of Books, The Financial Times, The National, The Guardian, Time, and other publications. He blogs at arabist.net.
Mona El-Ghobashy is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Barnard College. Her articles on political mobilization in contemporary Egypt have appeared in American Behavioral Scientist, the International Journal of Middle East Studies, and Middle East Report. In 2009, she was named a Carnegie Scholar to support a research project on Egyptian citizens’ use of street protests and court petitions to reclaim their rights.
Sharif Elmusa is Associate Professor of Political Science at the American University in Cairo. His books include A Harvest of Technology: The Super-Green Revolution in the Jordan Valley (Georgetown University Press, 1994), Water Conflict: Economics, Politics, Law, and Palestinian–Israeli Water Resources (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1998), and Flawed Landscapes: Poems, 1987–2008 (Interlink Press, 2008).
Linda Herrera is Associate Professor in the Department of Education Policy, Organization, and Leadership at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. A social anthropologist, she is currently working on youth, new media, and the Arab revolutions. She has co-edited two volumes, Being Young and Muslim: New Cultural Politics in the Global South and North (Oxford University Press, 2010, with Asef Bayat) and Cultures of Arab Schooling: Critical Ethnographies from Egypt (SUNY Press, 2006, with C. A. Torres).
Hanan Kholoussy is Assistant Professor of History at the American University in Cairo. She is the author of For Better, For Worse: The Marriage Crisis That Made Modern Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2010) and several articles on gender, law, and nationalism in Egypt.
Ursula Lindsey is a journalist and writer who has lived in Cairo since 2002. She is the Middle East correspondent of The Chronicle of Higher Education and she writes about politics, media, and culture in the Arab world for a variety of publications. She covered the Egyptian revolution for Public Radio International’s The World and Newsweek and is a regular contributor to The Arabist blog (www.arabist.net).
Timothy Mitchell is Professor and Chair of the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. He joined Columbia in 2008 after teaching for twenty-five years at New York University, where he served as Director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies. His books include Colonising Egypt (University of California Press, 1991), Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (University of California Press, 2002), and Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (Verso, 2011).
Karen Pfeifer is Professor Emerita of Economics at Smith College. She has published numerous articles and book chapters, and was named a Fulbright Senior Scholar twice. Her current scholarly projects focus on the relation between the discipline of economics and Middle East area studies.
Amal Sabri was director of the environment and development program of the Association for Health and Environmental Development, an Egyptian NGO. She previously worked in the Middle East office of Oxfam in Cairo.
Paul Schemm is chief correspondent in North Africa for the Associated Press. He joined AP in 2007 in Cairo as an editor for the Middle East regional editing desk. Previously he worked as a reporter for Agence France-Presse in Baghdad and Cairo. He has written for a number of publications including the Middle East Times, Cairo Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Christian Science Monitor, and the Boston Globe, among others.
Samer S. Shehata is Assistant Professor of Arab Politics at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. He is author of Shop Floor Culture and Politics in Egypt (SUNY Press, 2009) and editor of Islamist Politics in the Middle East: Movements and Change (forthcoming, Routledge, 2012).
Ahmad Shokr is a doctoral candidate in Middle East history at New York University and a senior editor at the English edition of al-Masry al-Youm, Egypt’s best-selling private newspaper. His articles have been published in Arab Studies Journal, Economic and Political Weekly, and Middle East Report.
Jeannie Sowers is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of New Hampshire. She has published in Climatic Change, Journal of Environment and Development, Development and Change, and Middle East Report. Her book Environmental Politics in Egypt is forthcoming from Routledge.
Joshua Stacher is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Kent State University. He has published articles in Middle East Journal and History Compass (among others), as well as frequently contributed to Middle East Report. His book Adaptable Autocrats: Regime Power in Egypt and Syria is forthcoming from Stanford University Press (expected Spring 2012).
Ewan Stein is Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh. His forthcoming book is Representing Israel in Modern Egypt: Ideas, Intellectuals, and Foreign Policy from Nasser to Mubarak (IB Tauris). He has published articles in International Studies Quarterly, Review of International Studies, Third World Quarterly, and Middle East Report.
Ted Swedenburg is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Arkansas. His books include Memories of Revolt: The 1936–1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past (University of Minnesota Press, 1995); Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity (co-edited with Smadar Lavie, Duke University Press, 1996); and Palestine, Israel, and the Politics of Popular Culture (coedited with Rebecca Stein, Duke, 2005).
Mariz Tadros is a fellow with the Institute for Development Studies at the University of Sussex. Her publications include an article in Journal of Security, Conflict, and Development (March 2011), an edited volume, “Gender, Rights, and Religion at the Crossroads” (IDS Bulletin, January 2011), and a forthcoming book on the Muslim Brothers (Routledge, 2012).
Chris Toensing is Executive Director of the Middle East Research and Information Project and editor of Middle East Report. An Arabic speaker, he lived in Egypt for three years in the 1990s. He is co-editor, with Mimi Kirk, of Uncovering Iraq: Trajectories of Disintegration and Transformation (Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University, 2011). He has written for The Nation, The Progressive and other US newspapers and magazines, and frequently appears on radio and TV to discuss Middle East affairs and US Middle East policy.
Jessica Winegar is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Northwestern University. She is the author of Creative Reckonings: The Politics of Art and Culture in Contemporary Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2006), which won the Albert Hourani Book Award for best book in Middle East studies. Her articles have appeared in Cultural Anthropology, Anthropological Quarterly, Review of Middle East Studies, Contemporary Practices, and online at Jadaliyya and ArteEast.