AUGUSTUS RICHARD NORTON (Ph.D., University of Chicago) is a Professor in the Departments of International Relations and Anthropology at Boston University. In 2006-7 he was Distinguished Visiting Scholar at al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo.
He is a contributing editor to Current History, and co-editor (with Dale Eickelman) of the Princeton University Press Muslim Politics series. His articles and other publications include "The New Media, Civic Pluralism and the Struggle for Political Reform," in New Media in the Muslim World The Emerging Public Sphere, Second Edition, Dale Eickelman and Jon Anderson, eds. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004); "Thwarted Politics: The Case of Egypt's Hizb al-Wasat," in Remaking Muslim Politics: Pluralism, Contestation, Democratization, Robert Hefner, ed. (sponsored by the Pew Foundation and from Princeton University Press); and, "Middle East Political Reform" with Farhad Kazemi, in the Foreign Policy Association's Great Decisions 2004 volume. His newest book is Hezbollah: A Short History, published in 2007, with a new 2009 edition in paper.

He headed the Ford Foundation-funded "Civil Society in the Middle East" program at New York University in the 1990s, which was co-chaired by Farhad Kazemi. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a co-founder of the Conference Group on the Middle East, and a co-founder of the Boston Forum on the Middle East.. In 2006-7 he held a Senior Fulbright Research Fellowship in Egypt, Kuwait and Bangladesh. He held earlier Senior Fulbright Felllowships in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Norway. A former Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Oxford University Centre for Islamic Studies, he now serves on the Centre's Academic Advisory Board. In 2006 he was an advisor to the Iraq Study Group. In the spring of 2008 he will be visiting professor of politics at Oxford University.