We hope you have been enjoying the relaunch of MERIP’s blog, which aims to complement our time-honored long-form analysis in Middle East Report and Middle East Report Online with a more spontaneous, ongoing conversation. MERIP’s blog is produced by our staff (Chris Toensing and Amanda Ufheil-Somers) with help from rotating teams drawn from our editorial committee. So, in addition to other contributors, you will see more from four of our editors in particular over the next few months:

David McMurray is associate professor of anthropology at Oregon State University and a returning member of our editorial committee. For MERIP he has written primarily about North Africa and labor migration. He is author of In and Out of Morocco: Migration and Smuggling in a Frontier Boomtown (2001) as well as numerous articles about migration and music. He recently completed a year of fieldwork in the northern Moroccan town of Nador.

Mezna Qato is Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Fellow at the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University. Her Oxford dissertation was about the social history of Palestinian education in Jordan. She has written widely about the challenges before the Palestinian struggle for self-determination. She is also author of an expansive socio-historical map of Palestinian refugee and exile communities as part of the Civitas research collective. She’ll be blogging about Palestinian movements and momentums, schools and students, and archive dilemmas.

Jillian Schwedler is professor of political science at Hunter College (City University of New York). She was chair of MERIP's board of directors from 2001-2009. Her first book, Faith in Moderation (2006), is a comparative study of political Islam in Jordan and Yemen. Her current research interests center around contentious politics, protest and dissent, and consumer culture. For MERIP she has written mostly about Jordanian politics and democratization or lack thereof in the Arab world. She will be blogging about protests, consumer culture and things that annoy her.

George R. Trumbull IV is associate professor of history at Dartmouth College. His first book is An Empire of Facts: Colonial Power, Cultural Knowledge and Islam in Algeria, 1870-1914 (2009) and he is at work on a second manuscript entitled Land of Thirst, Land of Fear: A History of Water in the Sahara from Empire to Oil. His interests include Islamic Africa and the history of resources, particularly water. For MERIP he has written about water and Red Sea piracy, among other topics. He will be blogging about North African politics and environmental questions in the region more broadly.