Biography

James Ryan is a historian of the modern Middle East with a focus on the late Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey. His scholarly work has focused on the development of political opposition and dissent in Turkey during the interwar period, and he has also published on the development of public transit infrastructure in Istanbul from the late Ottoman period through the 1950s. He is currently the Executive Director of the Middle East Research and Information Project (www.merip.org), a non-profit that has supported critical reporting on and analysis of Middle Eastern politics, culture, and society since 1971. He has previously served as the Associate Director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at New York University, and as the Director of Research and the Middle East Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He completed his Ph.D. In History at the University of Pennsylvania in 2017 and has a bachelors in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago.