Wendy Pearlman is Associate Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University, where she also holds the Martin and Patricia Koldyke Outstanding Teaching Professorship and is a Faculty Fellow at the Buffett Institute for Global Studies. She earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University, an MA from Georgetown University, and a BA from Brown University. Her research focuses on the comparative politics of the Middle East, social movements, political violence, refugees and migration, emotions and mobilization, and the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Wendy is the author of four books. The first, Occupied Voices: Stories of Everyday Life from the Second Intifada (2003), was a Boston Globe and Washington Post bestseller. The second, Violence, Nonviolence, and the Palestinian National Movement (2011), was named one of Foreign Policy’s best books on the Middle East in 2011.
Wendy’s third book, We Crossed a Bridge and it Trembled: Voices from Syria (2017) is based on interviews that she has conducted from 2012 to the present with more than 300 displaced Syrians in Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, and the United States. The book is a collection of first-hand testimonials that chronicles the Syrian rebellion, war, and refugee crisis exclusively through the stories and reflections of people who have lived it.