Sanam Vakil

SANAM VAKIL is the James Anderson Adjunct Professor at the Johns Hopkins University SAIS Europe; and director of the Middle East and North Africa Program at Chatham House. Previously, she was the deputy director and a senior research fellow in the program. Dr. Vakil leads the Iran Forum project focusing on future trends in Iran’s domestic and foreign policy and follows GCC and Gulf Arab dynamics alongside wider regional security issues in the Middle East. She has been a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University associated with the Working Group on Islamism and the International Order.

Before these appointments, from 2003-2005, Dr. Vakil was an assistant professor of Middle East Studies at SAIS Washington. She served as a research associate at the Council on Foreign Relations also providing research analysis to the World Bank’s Middle East and North Africa department. Dr. Vakil provides research, commentary and political risk analysis for companies and organizations working in the Middle East. She has been consulted by high-ranking government officials in the United States and Europe. Dr. Vakil holds a PhD in international relations from SAIS. She is the author of numerous monographs, book reviews, working papers, and articles in U.S. and international journals on Middle East and U.S. foreign policy.