Sharan Grewal is an Assistant Professor of Government at American University and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He was previously assistant professor at William & Mary and a research fellow at the Middle East Initiative at Harvard. He received a PhD in Politics from Princeton University in 2018.
Sharan’s research examines revolutions and democratic transitions, particularly in the Arab world. His first book, Soldiers of Democracy? Military Legacies and the Arab Spring (Oxford University Press, 2023), explores the conditions under which militaries support or thwart democratic transitions, drawing on interviews and surveys of military personnel in Egypt and Tunisia. It received the APSA MENA Best Book Award and the APSA IS Robert Jervis Best International Security Book Award.
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. These papers have explored when Islamists become democrats, how discrimination shapes Muslim migrants, and why US training politicizes foreign militaries. These pieces have won Best Paper and Article Awards from APSA MENA and APSA’s Democracy & Autocracy 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 about Middle East politics for Brookings and the Washington Post, and has been interviewed by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Reuters, among others.
Contact: sgrewal@american.edu