Sharan Grewal is an Assistant Professor of Government at William & Mary, a research fellow at the Middle East Initiative at Harvard, and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He received a PhD in Politics from Princeton University in 2018. Starting August 2024, he will be an Assistant Professor of Government at American University.

Sharan’s research examines revolutions and democratic transitions, particularly in the Arab world. His first book, Soldiers of Democracy? (Oxford University Press, July 2023), explores the conditions under which militaries support or thwart democratic transitions. Sharan’s work has also been published in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, and British Journal of Political Science, among other journals. His work has won Best Paper Awards from APSA’s Democracy & Autocracy section and from APSA’s Middle East and North Africa section, as well as the Perry World House-Foreign Affairs Emerging Scholars Prize.

Sharan’s research has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the Henry Luce Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation, and the Smith Richardson Foundation. He writes regularly for Brookings, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, POMED, and the Carnegie Endowment, and has been interviewed by the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and Reuters, among others.

Contact: ssgrewal@wm.edu