A violent sorting out: Middle East expert Joshua Landis
Photo courtesy of the University of Oklahoma
Joshua M. Landis, associate professor at the University of Oklahoma and director of its Center for Middle East Studies, has served as a consultant to the State Department on Middle East issues. He is president of the Syrian Studies Association and runs the blog Syria Comment.
How did you become an expert on Syria, of all places?
I lived in Beirut and in Saudi Arabia for the first ten years of my life. My father worked for Citibank. After college I got a teaching job rather serendipitously in Lebanon in 1979, when Lebanon was in the middle of a civil war. I started learning Arabic and trying to figure out why the Lebanese were shooting each other.
