Augustus Richard Norton

Augustus Richard Norton (Ph.D., University of Chicago) is a Professor in the Departments of International Relations and Anthropology at Boston University. He is a contributing editor to Current History, and co-editor (with Dale Eickelman) of the Princeton University Press Muslim Politics series.

His latest publications include “The New Media, Civic Pluralism and the Struggle for Political Reform," in New Media in the Muslim World The Emerging Public Sphere, Second Edition, Dale Eickelman and Jon Anderson, eds. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004); "Thwarted Politics: The Case of Egypt's Hizb al-Wasat," in Remaking Muslim Politics: Pluralism, Contestation, Democratization, Robert Hefner, ed. (Princeton University Press); and, "Middle East Political Reform" with Farhad Kazemi, in the Foreign Policy Association's Great Decisions 2004 volume.

He headed the Ford Foundation-funded "Civil Society in the Middle East" Program at New York University in the 1990s, which was co-chaired by Farhad Kazemi. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Committee on Academic Freedom of the Middle East Studies Association; and he is also co-founder of the Conference Group on the Middle East, and co-founder, in 2002, of the Action Group of Concerned Middle East Scholars, a group based in Boston and Cambridge.

In 1999-2000 he was Fulbright Senior Research Fellow in Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon. He was also named Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Oxford University Centre for Islamic Studies for 1999-2000, where he continues to serve as an Academic Board Member. (2006)