Biography

Rami George Khouri is a senior fellow with the Middle East Initiative and an internationally syndicated political columnist and book author. He is Palestinian-Jordanian and a U.S. citizen whose family resides in Beirut, Amman, and Nazareth. He was the Founding​ Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs ​(IFI) at the American University of Beirut (AUB) in 2006-14; he is now a Senior Public Policy Fellow at IFI, and a visiting Adjunct Professor of journalism and Journalist-in-Residence at AUB, where he teaches and heads a research project to analyze the private papers of the late award-winning American journalist Anthony Shadid. His journalistic work includes writing books and an internationally syndicated column​ for Agence Global​.

​He spent ​an ​academic year as a Nieman Journalism Fellow at Harvard University​. He was appointed a member of the Brookings Institution Task Force on US Relations with the Islamic World​, is a Research Associate at the Program on the Analysis and Resolution of Conflict at the Maxwell School, Syracuse University (NY, USA), ​and ​a Fellow of the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs (Jerusalem)​. He serves on the ​Joint Advisory Board of the Northwestern University Journalism School in Doha, Qatar, and the international advisory board of the Center for Regional and International Studies at Georgetown University in Doha, Qatar. He has previously served on the Leadership Council of the Harvard University Divinity Schoolthe board of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University​, and the international advisory board of the International Committee of the Red Cross​. ​

​He was Executive Editor of the Beirut Daily Star newspaper in 2003–2005, and before that had been Editor-in-Chief of the Jordan Times for seven years, when he also wrote for many years from Amman, Jordan for leading international publications, including the Financial Times, the Boston Globe, and the Washington Post. For 18 years he was General Manager of Al Kutba, Publishers, in Amman, and served as a Consultant to the Jordanian Tourism Ministry on biblical archaeological sites. He has hosted programs on archaeology, history, and current public affairs on Jordan Television and Radio Jordan. He often comments on Mideast issues in the international media and lectures frequently at conferences and universities throughout the world.

He has a BA and an MSc degree respectively in political science and journalism from Syracuse University​.​

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