Howard Eissenstat writes frequently on Turkish foreign policy, political Islam in Turkey, democratization, and human rights issues. He earned his Ph.D. from UCLA in 2007 and is an Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern History at St. Lawrence University. His research focuses on the transformation of identities at the end of the Ottoman Empire and the nature of early Turkish nationalism. Eissenstat has also done work on popular violence in the early Turkish Republic and the role of Muslim émigrés from the Russian Empire in the development of Turkish nationalism.