Wendy Pearlman is the Jane Long Professor of Arts and Sciences and professor of political science at Northwestern University, and Co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Perspectives on Politics. A scholar of Middle East politics, social movements, conflict processes, and forced migration, she is the author of six books and more than 40 journal articles or book chapters.

Wendy has written three books on Palestine, Israel, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Occupied Voices: Stories of Everyday Life from the Second Intifada (Nation Books, 2003), a collection of interviews from Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, was a Boston Globe and Washington Post bestseller. Violence, Nonviolence, and the Palestinian National Movement (Cambridge University Press, 2011), named one of Foreign Policy’s best books on the Middle East in 2011, examines Palestinian’s 20th century history to consider how a self-determination movement’s internal organizational cohesion or fragmentation affects its strategies of protest. Triadic Coercion: Israel’s Targeting of States That Host Nonstate Actors (co-authored with Boaz Atzili, Columbia University Press, 2018) examines the causes and consequences of 70 years of Israel’s use violence and/or threats against neighboring states to prevent or punish their support for nonstate actors on their territory.

Since 2012, Wendy has also conducted interviews with more than 500  displaced Syrians on five continents. She shares these voices in two books. We Crossed a Bridge and it Trembled: Voices from Syria (HarperCollins, 2017) is a curation of testimonials and poetic fragments that chronicle and explain the Syrian experience of authoritarianism, revolution, and war. It ends with the forced migration of millions of Syrian refugees. The Home I Worked To Make: Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora (Liveright Books, 2024), is a second collection of personal stories. Taking Syria’s refugee outflow as its point of departure, it shares and explores Syrians’ stories and reflections on losing home, searching for home, and rethinking the meaning of home. Beyond these books, Wendy has also pulled on her interviews to write scholarly articles on 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. She also authored Muzoon: A Syrian Refugee Speaks Out  (Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2023), a middle-grade memoir written on behalf of Muzoon Almellehan and telling Muzoon’s story of fleeing Syria at age fourteen, living in camps in Jordan, and coming into her own as an internationally-recognized education advocate.

Wendy has published more than forty 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 earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University, an MA from Georgetown University, and a BA from Brown University. As a recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Fellowship, she was a fellow at EUME / 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 is represented by Ayesha Pande Literary. She tweets from @Wendy_Pearlman