Professor Fouad Ajami, Vice Chairman

Fouad Ajami is Professor and Director of Middle East Studies at The Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies where he has taught since 1980. Born in southern Lebanon and raised in Beirut, he is the author of Beirut: City of Regrets, The Vanished Imam, The Arab Predicament, and The Dream Palace of the Arabs. His most recent book is The Foreigner’s Gift: The Americans, the Arabs and the Iraqis in Iraq. He is a widely published essayist whose writings, some 300 essays, reviews, and columns of opinion, have appeared in Foreign Affairs, The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times Book Review, Foreign Policy, and The New York Times Magazine. He is a member of the editorial board of Foreign Affairs magazine. Since 2002, he has been a member of the Board of Directors of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Professor Ajami is the recipient of the five-year MacArthur Prize Fellowship which he was awarded in 1982. In 2006, he was granted the Bradley Prize for Outstanding Achievement. In November 2006 he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by the President of the United States and the National Endowment of the Humanities. The Humanities medal citation noted: Fouad Ajami is known "for his scholarship, which has revealed common threads of hope across lines of geography, religion, and history. With an unclouded eye and a poet's gift for words, he has broadened and enriched Americans' understanding of the yearnings, dreams, and predicaments of the people of the Middle East."