Academic Year 2007-2008
Spring 2008
Daniel C. Kurtzer holds the S. Daniel Abraham Chair in Middle East Policy Studies at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Kurtzer retired from the Foreign Service at the end of 2005 with the rank of Career-Minister in the Senior Foreign Service. He served as the U.S. Ambassador to Israel (2001-2005), and as the U.S. Ambassador to Egypt (1997-2001). During 29 years of public service, Kurtzer held a number of senior policy and diplomatic positions, including political officer at the American embassies in Cairo and Tel Aviv, speechwriter for Secretary of State George P. Shultz on the Policy Planning Staff, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, and Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research. Since leaving government service, Kurtzer has authored numerous articles on United States policy in the Middle East. He served on the Iraq Study Group’s expert subcommittees, and currently directs a project for the United States Institute of Peace on U.S. negotiating experience in the Arab-Israeli conflict. He spoke at the Athenaeum on “Annapolis and Beyond: High Stakes and High Risk in the Middle East Peace Process.”
William Quandt is the Edward Stettinius Professor of Politics and the University of Virginia, where he has taught since 1994. Before joining the faculty at Virginia, Dr. Quandt received a doctorate in Political Science from MIT and taught at the University of Pennsylvania and UCLA. His publications cover a range of Middle Eastern issues, from American foreign policy to Saudi Arabian oil and include Peace Process: American Democracy and the Arab-Israeli Conflict since 1967 (2001). Outside of academia, Dr. Quandt serves as a non-resident Senior Fellow of Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and is a former President of the Middle East Studies Association. Dr. Quandt also served as a National Security Council staff member for the Middle East (1972-4, 1977-9), and was involved in the negotiations leading up to the Camp David Accords and the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty. His Athenaeum talk was titled “Arab-Israeli Peace Making: Is It Still Possible?”