Associate Professor Dr. Deborah Wheeler
Associate Professor Deborah L. Wheeler received her PhD in Political Science with a focus on the Middle East from the University of Chicago. She wrote her doctoral thesis on the role of the media and popular culture in the Palestinian Israeli conflict. She joined the Naval Academy department of Political Science 2005 after having held several other positions in academia, and working for the United Nations Development Program in Amman, Jordan (2004). She has had two Senior Fulbright Research Grants to the Middle East (1996-7, Kuwait) and (2012-13, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Qatar), a research grant from Georgetown University Center for International and Regional Studies, Qatar (2011-12), a research fellowship at Oxford University (2003-4, Oxford Internet Institute, Balliol College), and numerous other grants. She has lectured throughout the Middle East and Europe on her research, which includes a focus on two major themes: 1. Internet diffusion and impact in the Middle East 2. Food security challenges in the Middle East. She has given dozens of conference papers, published more than a dozen articles and book chapters, has published a book, Internet in the Middle East: Global Expectations and Local Imaginations in Kuwait (State University of New York Press, 2006) and most recently, a book entitled Digital Resistance in the Middle East: New Media Activism in Everyday Life (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2017). She has conducted field work in Kuwait, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco, and traveled extensively in Asia and Europe. Her research languages include both Arabic and Hebrew, both of which she learned to equitably study the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. If you don't find her in her office, she is most likely on the squash courts.
Courses:
- FP369 Middle Eastern Politics
- FP468 Palestinian-Israeli Conflict
- FP469 Islam and Politics
- FP471C Digital Politics
- FP471G Middle East and New World (Dis)Order
- FP480 IT Research Seminar
