ASMEA Staff

Dr. Asaf Romirowsky, Executive Director

Asaf Romirowsky Ph.D. is the executive director of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA). Dr. Romirowsky is also a senior nonresident research fellow at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (BESA) and a professor [affiliate] at the University of Haifa. Trained as a Middle East historian, he holds a Ph.D. in Middle East and Mediterranean Studies from King's College London, UK and has published widely on various aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict and American foreign policy in the Middle East, as well as on Israeli and Zionist history.

Dr. Romirowsky is co-author of Religion, Politics, and the Origins of Palestine Refugee Relief and author or co-author of many journal articles and book chapters on topics related to international relations, the Middle East, and Arab-Palestinian refugees. Recently, he co-edited Word Crimes: Reclaiming the Language of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, a special issue of the journal Israel Studies.

Asaf Romirowsky Ph.D., is also the executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME). 

View press release of SPME and ASMEA collaboration here.

e: [email protected]
ph: 215.866.8811

Prof. Franck Salameh, Editor-in-Chief, Journal of the Middle East and Africa

Franck Salameh is Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Boston College. He holds a Ph.D in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies from Brandeis University, an M.A. in International Relations from Boston University, and a B.A from the University of Central Florida. Salameh's areas of specialization focus on Minorities in the Middle East, Contemporary Near Eastern History, History of Ideas and Political Thought and the Cultural, Linguistic, and Intellectual Traditions of the States of the Levant. His interests include Linguistic Nationalism, Arabism, Zionism, Francophonie, and the History of the French Language and French Missionaries in the Eastern Mediterranean. Salameh is also a memoirist, anthologist, biographer, and translator of poetry and prose from and into Arabic, French, English, Vernacular Lebanese, and Hebrew. His authored books include Lebanon's Jewish Community; Charles Corm: An Intellectual Biography of a "Young Phoenician"; The Other Middle East; Language Memory and Identity in the Middle East; and a forthcoming intellectual biography of Belgian-Lebanese Jesuit Henri Lammens.

Dr. Cole Bunzel, Book Review Editor, Journal of the Middle East and Africa

Cole Bunzel is a Hoover Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. A historian of the contemporary Middle East, he specializes in the Arabian Peninsula, Islamic theology and law, and modern Islamic radicalism. He has written extensively on the history of Saudi Arabia and the modern Sunni jihadi movement known as Jihadi Salafism. His first book, Wahhābism: The History of a Militant Islamic Movement (Princeton, 2023), provides a new and authoritative account of the first two centuries of the puritanical Wahhabi movement that arose in central Arabia in the mid-18^th century. Bunzel received an M.A. in international relations from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a B.A. and Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University. He has been a research fellow in Islamic law and civilization at Yale Law School and is a nonresident fellow at the George Washington University Program on Extremism.

e: [email protected]

Dr. Alex Joffe, Director of Strategic Affairs

Alex Joffe is an archaeologist and historian specializing in the Middle East and contemporary international affairs. He received a B.A. in History from Cornell University in 1981 and Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from the University of Arizona in 1991. From 1980 to 2003 he participated in and directed archaeological research in Israel, Jordan, Greece and the United States. 

Joffe taught at the Pennsylvania State University and Purchase College and was a Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. He is the author of more than 150 academic papers and reviews and 300 opinion pieces. His recent publications include Operation Crusader and the Desert War in British History and Memory, (Bloomsbury, 2020), and “Textiles in the Late Prehistoric Levant,” (Journal of the Israel Prehistoric Society 52, 2022).

Suzanne K. Sloan, Senior Director, Public Affairs
Managing Editor, Journal of the Middle East and Africa

e: [email protected]
ph: 771.223.7297

Emily Lucas, Membership and Operations Director

e: [email protected]
ph: 202.429.8860