Dr. George Azar
George Azar is a Photojournalist in Residence and a full-time instructor in Journalism and Digital Media. His photographs have appeared on the front pages of The New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, The Economist, Saudi Aramco World and other leading publications. Since 2006 he and Mariam Shahin, have produced over 50 films for the international satellite news network, Al Jazeera. Azar has also produced several documentaries for the internet news channel Vice News, including "Crime and Punishment in Gaza", "Renegade Jewish Settlers" and 'The Islamic State vs Lebanon". Azar is the author and photographer of the critically acclaimed book Palestine: A Photographic Journey, and the photographer of Palestine: A Guide, written by Mariam Shahin.
Dr. Sari Hanafi
Sari Hanafi is currently a Professor of Sociology and chair of the department of sociology, anthropology and media studies at the American University of Beirut. He is also the editor of Idafat: the Arab Journal of Sociology (Arabic). He is the Vice President of both the International Sociological Association and the Arab Council of Social Science. He is the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters on the political and economic sociology of the Palestinian diaspora and refugees; sociology of migration; transnationalism; politics of scientific research; civil society and elite formation and transitional justice.
Dr. Mona Harb
Mona Harb is Professor of Urban Studies and Politics at the American University of Beirut where she is also co-founder and research lead at the Beirut Urban Lab.Her research investigates governance and institutions in contexts of disasters and contested sovereignty, as well as city-making/commoning and oppositional politics. She is the author of Le Hezbollah à Beirut: de la banlieue à la ville, co-author of Leisurely Islam: Negotiating Geography and Morality in Shi’i South Beirut (with Lara Deeb), co-editor of Local Governments and Public Goods: Assessing Decentralization in the Arab World (with Sami Atallah), and co-editor of Refugees as City-Makers (with Mona Fawaz et al.). She serves on the editorial boards of MELG, IJMES, EPC, and CSSAME, and was previously on the boards of IJURR and the ACSS.
Dr. Rami Khouri
Rami George Khouri is co-Director of Global Engagement at the American University of Beirut (AUB), an internationally syndicated political columnist and book author, a previous professor of journalism and Journalist-in-Residence at AUB, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. He was the first director, and is now a senior fellow, at the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at AUB. He was the executive editor of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper, the editor-in-chief of the Jordan Times, and was awarded the Pax Christi International Peace Prize for 2006.
Dr. Karim Makdisi
Karim Makdisi is an Associate Professor of International Relations, and Director of the Program in Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut (AUB). He also served as the Associate Director at the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs from 2009-2014, and has coordinated the Environmental Policy program within AUB’s Interfaculty Environmental Sciences Program (IGESP) since 2004. Makdisi was a founding member and served on the first Board of Trustees of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS), where he is also currently an associated researcher in the Critical Studies Working Group.
Dr. Livia Wick
Livia Wick is associate professor of anthropology in the Sociology, Anthropology and Media Studies Department at the American University of Beirut who grew up in Ramallah, Palestine. She earned a BA from Brown University, an MA from the Institut National des Langues and Civilisations Orientales in Paris and a PhD from MIT. Her research and teaching interests are the Anthropology of medicine, science, birth, gender, war, oral history and infrastructure. She has conducted field research in Palestine and Lebanon. Her research has been supported by the Wenner Gren Foundation and the Palestinian American Research Center. Her book project explores birth during the Second Intifada (uprising) in Palestine. It follows stories about birth in various sites of the medical infrastructure in the Central West Bank, from hospitals, to village clinics and homes. It explores the lives and work of birth-mothers, doctors, midwives, nurses and families in a context of shrinking and militarized spaces.