Lisa Anderson (Ph.D., Columbia, 1981) is a specialist on politics in the Middle East and North Africa with particular research interests in state-formation and regime change. She served as Assistant Professor of Government and Social Studies at Harvard University from 1981 to 1986, Director of Columbia’s Middle East Institute, 1990-1993, Chair of the Political Science Department, 1994-1996, and since 1997, Dean of the School of International and Public Affairs. In addition to having published numerous scholarly articles, Professor Anderson is author of Pursuing Truth, Exercising Power: Social Science and Public Policy in the Twenty-first Century (Columbia University Press, 2003), The State and Social Transformation in Tunisia and Libya,1830-1980 (Princeton University Press, 1986), and editor of Transitions to Democracy (Columbia University Press, 1999). She serves as Chair of the Board of Directors of the Social Science Research Council. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and an emeritus member of the Board of Human Rights Watch.

Research Interests: Comparative Politics, Middle East, Arab world, North Africa, political development, regime change, Islamic politics, political liberalization, the state and state formation in the third world, comparative colonialism, economic reform in the third world.

Professor Anderson is on leave while serving as Provost of the American University in Cairo.