Ian Lustick

Ian S. Lustick is the Bess W. Heyman Chair in Political Science. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley in 1976. He is interested comparative politics, international politics, Middle Eastern politics, and agent-based, computer assisted modeling for the social sciences. He teaches courses on Middle Eastern politics, political identities and institutions, techniques of hegemonic analysis, the expansion and contraction of states, and on relationships among complexity, evolution, and politics. Dr. Lustick is a recipient of awards from the Carnegie Corporation, the Naitonal Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Sciences Research Council, and the United States Institute of Peace. Before coming to Penn, Professor Lustick taught for fifteen years at Dartmouth College and worked for one year in the Department of State. His present research focuses the politics of Jewish and non-Jewish migration into and out of Palestine/the Land of Israel, on prospects for peace between Israelis and Palestinians, and on applications of agent-based modeling to constructivist identity theory, Middle East politics and to the solution of conceptual and methodological problems associated with the relationship between political science and both history and historiography. He is a past president of the Politics and History Section of the American Political Science Association and of the Association for Israel Studies, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.