Samuel Helfont

Samuel Helfont is an Associate Professor of Strategy and Policy in the Naval War College program at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He is also an Affiliate Scholar in the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies at Stanford University and a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. His research focuses on international history and politics in the Middle East, especially Iraq and the Iraq Wars. He is the author of Compulsion in Religion: Saddam Hussein, Islam, and the Roots of Insurgencies in Iraq (Oxford University Press, 2018). His work has been published by Foreign Affairs, The Middle East Journal, Orbis, The New Republic, The American Interest, War on the Rocks, The Jewish Review of Books, and the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University among several other outlets. Helfont holds a PhD in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. Prior to moving to Monterey, he completed a three year post-doctoral lectureship at the University of Pennsylvania. He has also served as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Haverford College, and was the recipient of US Scholar Research Support Fellowship from the Hoover Library and Archives at Stanford University. For more information, see www.SamuelHelfont.com