Amy Austin Holmes is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the American University in Cairo, and was the Fall 2019 Kuwait Foundation Visiting Scholar at the Middle East Initiative, Harvard Kennedy School.

She began teaching at AUC in 2008, after finishing her PhD at Johns Hopkins University. A former Fulbright scholar in Germany, she is the author of Coups and Revolutions: Mass Mobilization, the Egyptian Military, and the United States from Mubarak to Sisi, published by Oxford University Press in 2019. Her first book Social Unrest and American Military Bases in Turkey and Germany since 1945 was published by Cambridge University Press. 

Having spent a decade living in the Middle East through the period known as the Arab Spring, she has published numerous articles on Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Tunisia, and Bahrain. She has also written about minority groups in the Middle East including Kurds, Syriac-Assyrian Christians, and Nubians. 

She has provided expert briefings in Congress and at the House of Lords of the British parliament. In addition to her academic publications, she has published a number of policy-oriented reports and op-eds. 

Professor Holmes is the first person to have conducted a field survey of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) based on numerous trips to all six provinces of Northeast Syria between 2015-2019.