Michael Doran
Visiting Professor
MA & Ph.D. in History, Princeton University
An expert on the international politics of the Middle East, Mike Doran has worked in both academia and government. His research interests include US policy toward the Middle East, radical Islam, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. He is particularly interested in inter-Arab relations, believing that contests for power and authority within Arab societies and between Arab states have an unrecognized influence, both over relations between the Middle East and the West, and over the Arab-Israeli conflict. Thus his book, Pan-Arabism before Nasser, interprets the 1948 Arab-Israeli war as an inter-Arab conflict. And one of his articles, "Somebody Else's Civil War" (Foreign Affairs, Jan/Feb 2002), was the first piece after 9/11 to interpret al-Qaeda's attacks on New York and Washington as an expression of a war within Islam -- a thesis that is now common wisdom. In academia, Doran has held appointments at Princeton University and the University of Central Florida. In government he has served as a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and as a Senior Director at the National Security Council. His principal teaching focus at Wagner will be to introduce undergraduates to relations between the United States and the Middle East.
