2014 Workshop

Manal Jamal

Assistant Professor of Political Science, James Madison University

Dr. Manal A. Jamal is Assistant Professor of Political Science at James Madison University. She received her Ph.D. in political science from McGill University in 2006, specializing in the comparative politics of developing areas. She also holds a B.A. and M.A. in International Relations from the University of California, Davis, and San Francisco State University, respectively. Prior to joining the faculty of JMU she was a Sultan post-doctoral fellow at UC Berkeley’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, a research fellow at the Dubai School of Government, and a visiting scholar at Harvard University’s Dubai Initiative at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. She previously taught at McGill University, University of California: Berkeley, and Mills College. Dr. Jamal currently serves as a member of the Middle East Studies Association's Committee for Academic Freedom.

Her research and teaching interests include democratization, war-to-peace transitions, and the politics of the Middle East, including the Arab-Israeli conflict. She is currently working on a book manuscript, Democracy Promotion in Troubled Times: the Limits of Western Donor Assistance to Civil Society, which examines the impact of donor assistance to civil society in the Palestinian territories and El Salvador. This manuscript draws from fieldwork for which the author was a winner of the best fieldwork award of the Comparative Democratization section of the American Political Science Association.