Tarek Masoud named Director of Alwaleed Islamic Studies Program
Islamic Studies Today 2018
Tarek Masoud Named Director of Alwaleed Islamic Studies Program
Tarek Masoud, Professor of Public Policy and the Sultan Qaboos bin Said of Oman Professor of International Relations at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, became the first Director of the Alwaleed Program outside of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Divinity School in 2018, thereby expanding the reach of the university-wide Program and representing its interdisciplinary mission. Professor Masoud holds an A.B. from Brown University and a Ph.D. from Yale University, both in political science. In addition to his teaching and research on political development in Arabic-speaking and Muslim-majority countries, Professor Masoud serves as the Director of the Middle East Initiative and of the Initiative on Democracy in Hard Places at the Kennedy School. He is the author of Counting Islam: Religion, Class, and Elections in Egypt (2014), The Arab Spring: Pathways of Repression and Reform with Jason Brownlee and Andrew Reynolds (2015), and several articles and book chapters. Under Professor Masoud’s leadership, the Alwaleed Program expanded its activities to include the Alwaleed bin Talal Seminar in Islamic Studies, the Alwaleed bin Talal Thesis Prizes, early-career faculty grants, and the Harvard Islamica Podcast.
