Gregory Aftandilian

Gregory Aftandilian is an adjunct faculty member at the Pardee School where he teaches “The Middle East Today” (IR 511) in the summer. He is also Senior Professorial Lecturer at American University in Washington, D.C. where he teaches courses on U.S. foreign policy and Middle East politics. Outside of teaching, he is a Non-resident Fellow at the Arab Center in Washington, D.C. where he writes monthly articles on Middle East developments. Prior to these positions, he spent over twenty years in U.S. Government service, which included being a foreign policy advisor to Representative Chris Van Hollen (2007-08), professional staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and foreign policy adviser to Senator Paul Sarbanes (2000-04), and foreign policy fellow to Senator Edward Kennedy (1999). Mr. Aftandilian also worked for 13 years as a Middle East analyst at the U.S. Department of State where he was a recipient of the Department’s Superior Honor Award for his analyses on Egypt. His other government experiences include analytical work for the U.S. Department of Defense and the Library of Congress. He was a research fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University (2006-07) and an International Affairs Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York (1991-92). Mr. Aftandilian is the author of Egypt’s Bid for Arab Leadership: Implications for U.S. Policy, several monographs for Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College, and has been interviewed numerous times by various media. He holds a B.A. in History from Dartmouth College, an M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Chicago, and an M.Sc. in International Relations from the London School of Economics.