Howard Eissenstat

Howard Eissenstat is a Laurentian Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of History at St. Lawrence University, where he teaches courses on Middle East History and Politics.

He received his Ph.D. in Modern Middle East History in 2007 from UCLA, where he wrote his dissertation on the interplay between Muslim identity and Turkish nationalism in the late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish Republic. He did a post-doc at the Crown Center at Brandeis University in 2008-09, before coming to St. Lawrence University in 2009. In addition, Eissenstat served as a Turkey Country Specialist for Amnesty International, USA between 2006 and 2017 and was primary author of the Turkey section of the Freedom House Annual Report from 2018-20.  He was a senior non-resident scholar at the Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED) from 2017-20. He writes 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 

Eissenstat has lectured at the Foreign Service Institute of the U.S. Department of State, the US military, and the Canadian Foreign Service Institute, as well as given testimony to the Canadian Senate and offered briefing to Congressional Committees.  He is a frequent media commentator.