Wendy Pearlman is Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University, where she also holds the Crown Professorship of Middle East Studies and serves as the Interim Director of the Middle East and North Africa Studies Program. She earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University, an MA from Georgetown University, and a BA from Brown University. Her research focuses on the comparative politics of the Middle East, social movements, political violence, refugees and migration, emotions and mobilization, and the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Wendy is the author of five books. The first, Occupied Voices: Stories of Everyday Life from the Second Intifada (Nation Books, 2003), was a Boston Globe and Washington Post bestseller. The second, Violence, Nonviolence, and the Palestinian National Movement (Cambridge University Press, 2011), was named one of Foreign Policy’s best books on the Middle East in 2011.

Wendy’s third book, We Crossed a Bridge and it Trembled: Voices from Syria (Custom House, 2017) is based on interviews that she has conducted from 2012 to the present with more than 300 displaced Syrians in Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, and the United States. The book is a collection of first-hand testimonials that chronicles the Syrian rebellion, war, and refugee crisis exclusively through the stories and reflections of people who have lived it. Wendy has also pulled on this interview material to write articles on a range of topics, including political fear, collective action, protest cascades, transnational diffusion, and rebel fragmentation, among other topics. Her long-form narrative essays, Love in the Syrian Revolution and Fathers of Revolution, tell the stories of some of the extraordinary people whose stories she has collected.

Wendy’s fourth book, co-authored with Boaz Atzili (American University), is Triadic Coercion: Israel’s Targeting of States That Host Nonstate Actors (Columbia University Press, 2018). It examines the causes and consequences of 70 years of Israel’s use of “triadic coercion”: the situation when a state uses violence and/or threats against another state to deter it from supporting a nonstate actor on its territory, or to compel that state to stop that nonstate actor.

Wendy’s fifth book, Muzoon: A Syrian Refugee Speaks Out  (Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2023). is a middle-grade memoir authored on behalf of Muzoon Almellehan. It tells Muzoon’s story of fleeing Syria at age fourteen, living in refugee camps in Jordan, and coming into her own as an internationally-recognized education advocate.

Wendy is currently completing her sixth book, The Home I Worked To Make: Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora, a collection of interviews with displaced Syrians exploring their stories and reflections on the meaning of home. It is forthcoming from Liveright Books (W.W. Norton) in June  2024.

As a recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Fellowship for Experienced Researchers, Wendy will be a fellow at EUME at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin during the summers 2016-2018 and 2021-2022. Previously, Wendy was a Fulbright Scholar in Spain, a Starr Foundation Fellow at the Center for Arabic Studies Abroad at the American University in Cairo, a Junior Peace Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace, and a postdoctoral Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. She has studied or conducted research in Spain, Germany, Morocco, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Israel, and the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Wendy has published more than thirty-five articles or book chapters, including in journals such as American Political Science Review,  Perspectives on Politics, International Migration Review, International Security, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Politics & Society, and Security Studies. She has been awarded the Weinberg College Distinguished Teaching Award and R. Barry Farrell Award for Excellence in Teaching, and has been elected to the Associated Student Government Faculty Honor Roll three times. She has won “best article” awards from the Moise A. Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies and the Syrian Studies Association, as well as the 2011 Deborah Gerner Grant for Professional Development.

Wendy is represented by Ayesha Pande Literary. She tweets from @Wendy_Pearlman