Courtney Freer is the provost’s postdoctoral fellow at Emory University. She served as an assistant professorial research fellow at the Middle East Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science from 2015-20. She is also a nonresident fellow in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution.

Her academic work focuses on the domestic politics of the Gulf Arab states and Islamism. She received her DPhil in politics from the University of Oxford in 2015, having written a thesis revising rentier state theory by examining the sociopolitical role played by Muslim Brotherhood groups in Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. The findings of this work were published by Oxford University Press in 2018 as Rentier Islamism: The Influence of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gulf Monarchies. She previously worked at the Brookings Doha Center in Qatar and the U.S.-Saudi Business Council in Washington, DC. Freer holds a BA in Near Eastern studies from Princeton University and an MA in Middle Eastern studies from the George Washington University.