Amatzia Baram is a professor emeritus in the Department of the History of the Middle East and founder and director of the Center for Iraq Studies at the University of Haifa, Israel. Baram completed all three of his degrees at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was awarded a PhD in 1986 for a dissertation on Baathist Iraq and has taught at the University of Haifa since then. He wrote studies and lectured on Iraqi society (with an emphasis on the tribes of Iraq) for the U.S. military from 2005-09. At the University of Haifa, he served as chairman of the Department of Middle East History and director of the Jewish-Arab Center and worked in the Institute for Middle East Studies. His main fields of study are Iraq from 1920-2013; politics, religion, culture, and society; tribe and state in the Middle East; the Arab Shia; political Islam; and Baathist Syria.  

Baram has been a resident fellow at a number of international research institutions. He was a senior associate member at St Antony’s College, Oxford in 1989 and 1990. He was a senior fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (1990, 1994-95, and 2005), the United States Institute of Peace (1997-98 and 2003-04), and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center. Additionally, he worked at the Brookings Institution in 2002-03. In 1998-99 and 2010-11, Baram taught as a Goldman Chair Professor at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. Baram has advised the Israeli government since 1980 and advised multiple U.S. administrations on Iraq and the Gulf. Baram has been interviewed by most of the world’s leading TV and radio stations (including CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC, CNBC, MSNBC, PBS, NPR, and the BBC, as well as Canadian, German, Italian, Dutch, and Japanese broadcasters). He has also been interviewed by and published articles in leading publications (such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Times of London, Financial Times, The Guardian, Foreign Policy, and Foreign Affairs). Baram has published four books and some 70 articles in professional magazines. Baram co-wrote Iraq Between Occupations: Perspectives from 1920 to the Present (Palgrave MacMillan, 2010). Baram’s latest book is Saddam Husayn and Islam, 1968–2003: Ba’thi Iraq from Secularism to Faith (Woodrow Wilson Center Press with Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).