Amy Hawthorne is a Middle East specialist with a particular interest in authoritarianism, democratic movements, and U.S. foreign policy in this region. She serves as the Deputy Director for Research at the Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED) in Washington, DC.

Prior to this, she was a Senior Fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East, and served in the Obama administration at the Department of State, where she focused on Egypt and Tunisia during the 2011 Arab Uprisings. Amy also was the founding executive director of the Hollings Center for International Dialogue, an NGO based in Washington and Istanbul, and a fellow in the Democracy and Rule of Law program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She began her Washington career at the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, where she managed governance programs in Yemen, West Bank and Gaza, and Morocco.

Amy’s commentary has appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times and on National Public Radio, CNN, FOX News, BBC News, and Al Jazeera. She has testified before Congress on U.S. policy in the Middle East.

Amy received her BA in history from Yale University and her MA in modern Middle Eastern studies from the University of Michigan. As a Fulbright Scholar, she studied at Cairo’s Al Azhar University.  An Arabic speaker, Amy has spent extensive time in the Arab world, as well as in Turkey.  She is a third-generation Californian.

Fun fact:  Amy’s interest in the Middle East began in high school, as did her other passion– cooking and baking.  She dreams of one day opening her own bakery in her gourmet hometown of Berkeley, CA.