Uniting
Research and Policy

Melani Cammett is the Clarence Dillon Professor of International Affairs in the Department of Government at Harvard University, a position she has held since 2017. She has also served as Director of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs since July 2021. Her research examines ethnic politics, conflict, development, and authoritarianism, with a particular focus on the Middle East. Currently, she is working on a book about how communities rebuild and coexist after violence, with case studies from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Lebanon, and Northern Ireland. Additionally, Cammett holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.  

Between 2002 and 2017, Cammett taught political economy and political science at Brown University. From 2012 to 2017, she was affiliated with the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs as a faculty fellow. She served as Director of the Watson Institute's Middle East Studies Program between 2009 and 2012. Melani Cammett's most prominent works include Compassionate Communalism: Welfare and Sectarianism in Lebanon (Cornell University Press, 2014), which earned the American Political Science Association's Giovanni Sartori Book Award. Another notable publication is A Political Economy of the Middle East, co-authored with Ishac Diwan, Alan Richards, and John Waterbury (2015), with a new edition expected in 2025. These books underscore her expertise in welfare, sectarianism, and political economy in the Middle East. 

Cammett earned her PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2002. She also holds an MA from the Fletcher School at Tufts University (1994) and a BA from Brown University (1991). At Harvard, she teaches both graduate and undergraduate courses in comparative politics, the political economy of development, ethnic politics, research design, and Middle East politics.