Tarek Masoud is a Professor of Public Policy and the Sultan Qaboos bin Said of Oman Professor of International Relations at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he is also Faculty Chair of the Middle East Initiative. His research focuses on political development in Arabic-speaking and Muslim-majority countries. He is the author of Counting Islam: Religion, Class, and Elections in Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 2014), of The Arab Spring: Pathways of Repression and Reform with Jason Brownlee and Andrew Reynolds (Oxford University Press, 2015), as well as of several articles and book chapters. He is a 2009 Carnegie Scholar, a trustee of the American University in Cairo, a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Democracy, and the recipient of grants from the National Science Foundation and the Paul and Daisy Soros foundation, among others. He holds an AB from Brown and a Ph.D from Yale, both in political science.

William J. Dobson is the politics & foreign affairs editor for Slate. Previously, he served as the managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine. Under his editorial direction, the magazine was nominated for the National Magazine Award five years in a row—the only publication of its size to be nominated for five consecutive years—and in 2007 and 2009, Foreign Policy won the overall award for General Excellence. Earlier in his career, Mr. Dobson served as Newsweek International’s Senior Editor for Asia and as Associate Editor at Foreign Affairs.

During the height of the Arab Spring, the Washington Post editorial page commissioned Mr. Dobson to write daily online pieces on modern authoritarianism. While in Cairo, Mr. Dobson reported the first direct first-person account of the Egyptian military conducting torture of female protestors from Tahrir Square.

Mr. Dobson has published widely on international politics. His articles and op-eds have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, Foreign Policy, The New Republic, Newsweek, and elsewhere. He has provided commentary and analysis on international politics for ABC, CNN, CBS, MSNBC, and NPR.

From 2008 to 2009, Mr. Dobson was a Visiting Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. In 2006, Mr. Dobson was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. He has been recognized and awarded honors by a number of international foundations, including the Salzburg Global Seminar, the East-West Center, the Knight Foundation, the Council for the United States and Italy, and the Singapore International Foundation. He has received fellowships from Harvard University, the University of Chicago, and Stanford University. Mr. Dobson is a 1994 Truman Scholar.

Mr. Dobson holds a law degree from Harvard Law School and a Masters degree in East Asian Studies from Harvard University. He received his bachelor’s degree, summa cum laude, from Middlebury College. He lives in Washington, DC.