Howard Eissenstat is Laurentian Associate Professor of History at St. Lawrence University, where he teaches courses on Middle East History and Politics.  He is returning to SUITS after being a visiting scholar here in spring 2024.

Howard Eissenstat

Eissenstat 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 and has been a non-resident scholar at the Middle East Institute since 2022.

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. Recent works include an edited volume with Gönül Tol, Turkish Views: Crisis and Opportunities for Turkey (2023); “The U.S. will be buying our textile exports!: “Özal, Reagan, and Neo-Liberalism,” in Alp Yenen and Erik Jan Zűrcher, eds,  A Hundred Years of Republican History: A History in a Hundred Fragments, (Leiden, 2024), and "Recep Tayyip Erdoğan: From ‘Illiberal Democracy’ to Electoral Authoritarianism,” in Klauss Larres, ed., Dictators and Autocrats: Securing Power across Global Politics (Routledge, 2021).

Eissenstat has given lectures for the U.S. military and for both the Foreign Service Institute of the U.S. Department of State and the Canadian Foreign Service Institute.  He has given formal testimony to the Canadian Senate and the U.S. Congress.  He has written commentary for Slate, the Washington Post, World Politics Review, and Reuters, among many others.