Amy Austin Holmes is Research Professor of International Affairs at George Washington University and is also on the faculty at the Bush School of Government and Public Service in Washington DC. She holds a PhD from Johns Hopkins University, and has more than a decade of experience working in the Middle East, often in conflict zones. Her cross-disciplinary research sits at the intersection of international affairs, governance, and U.S. foreign policy.

She is the author of three books published with Cambridge and Oxford University Press. In her new book Statelet of Survivors, she offers a groundbreaking perspective on how minorities have navigated repeated episodes of mass violence from the end of the Ottoman Empire to the present. The book analyzes how Kurdish, Armenian, and Assyrian communities—descendants of earlier atrocities—again faced existential threats under the Islamic State and forged an unlikely alliance, even before the United States intervened.

In her other work, she has also published about Yezidis in Iraq and Syria, Nubians and Copts in Egypt, and the Druze in southern Syria. Dr. Holmes previously served as a tenured Associate Professor of Sociology at the American University in Cairo and as a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University’s Belfer Center.

In addition to her academic career, Dr Holmes also served at the U.S. State Department through a Council on Foreign Relations fellowship, where she first worked in the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, focused on Iraq and Syria. She then also served on the Turkey Desk in the Office of Southern European Affairs. After the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, she volunteered during the summer of 2023 and taught a course at the Kyiv School of Economics.