Director

Mark Tessler is Samuel J. Eldersveld Collegiate Professor of Political Science. He is also Vice Provost for International Affairs and Director of the University's International Institute. Professor Tessler specializes in Comparative Politics and Middle East Studies. He has studied and/or conducted field research in Tunisia, Israel, Morocco, Egypt, and Palestine (West Bank and Gaza). He is one of the very few American scholars to have attended university and lived for extended periods in both the Arab world and Israel. He has also spent several years teaching and consulting in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Many of Professor Tessler's publications examine the nature, determinants, and political implications of attitudes and values held by ordinary citizens the Middle East. This work has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Institute for Peace, the U.S. State Department, and others. Professor Tessler is presently analyzing public opinion data from eight Middle Eastern countries, giving prominent attention to attitudes and values relating to democracy, Israeli-Palestinian peace, political Islam, and gender. Recent reports of this research appear in Comparative Politics, World Politics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, International Studies Quarterly, and Public Opinion Quarterly.

Professor Tessler has also written extensively on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He is the author of A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, which won national honors and was named a "Notable Book of 1994" by The New York Times. Professor Tessler is currently updating this book. He is also coauthor of Transition to Palestinian Self-Government: Practical Steps toward Israeli-Palestinian Peace, which is based on the report of an American Academy of Arts and Sciences study group composed of American, Israeli, and Palestinian scholars.

Professor Tessler is General Editor of the Indiana University Press series in Middle East Studies. He served from 1995 to 2004 as President of the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, which maintains research facilities in Tunisia and Morocco and is a member of the Council of American Overseas Research Centers located at the Smithsonian Institution. He is also a past President of the Association for Israel Studies and was a founding member of the Palestinian-American Research Center. His prior university administrative experience includes direction of the Center for Political Studies, which is a part of the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research. Professor Tessler directed two Title VI National Resource Centers before coming to the University of Michigan in 2001: the University of Wisconsin Joint Center for International Studies at Milwaukee and Madison, and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies of the University of Arizona.