Dr. Howard Eissenstat

Howard Eissenstat is an Associate Professor of Middle East history at St. Lawrence University.  He received his PhD in Modern Middle East History from UCLA in 2007 and was a post-doctoral fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University in 2008-2009.  Eissenstat's research focuses on nationalism and Islam in the 19th century Ottoman Empire as well as the history of the Turkish Republic.  His recent work has focused increasingly on contemporary Turkish domestic and foreign policy, especially on issues of rule-of-law, minority rights, and the reshaping of political culture under the AKP. 

In addition to traditional academic work, Dr. Eissenstat served as a Turkey Country Specialist for Amnesty International-USA from 2006 - 2017.  He was a Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Project on Middle East Democracy from 2017 - 2020.  Eissenstat has lectured at the Foreign Service Institute of the U.S. Department of State, the US military, and the Canadian Foreign Service Institute and given testimony to the Canadian Senate and offered briefing to Congressional Committees. His op-eds have appeared in USA Today, Reuters, and the Washington Post.