Sami Hermez, PhD, is director of the Liberal Arts Program and associate professor in residence of anthropology at Northwestern University in Qatar. He obtained his doctorate degree from the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University. He is the author of War is Coming: Between Past and Future Violence in Lebanon (UPenn 2017), which focuses on the everyday life of political violence in Lebanon and how people recollect and anticipate this violence, and My Brother, My Land: A Story from Palestine (Stanford 2024), an award winning book that tells the story of a Palestinian family resisting ongoing Israeli settler colonialism.
His broader research concerns include the study of social movements, the state, the future, memory, violence, and critical security in the Arab World. Sami coordinates an Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS) working group on Critical Security Studies, as well as the Qatar Hub for this project at the Institute for Advanced Study at Northwestern University in Qatar (IAS_NUQ). He is also a Senior Researcher at Security In Context
He has held posts as a visiting scholar in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University, visiting professor of Contemporary International Issues at the University of Pittsburgh, visiting professor of anthropology at Mt. Holyoke College, and postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Lebanese Studies, St. Antony’s College, Oxford University.