Ian Lustick is Professor of Political Science and holder of the Bess W. Heyman Chair (Emeritus) at the University of Pennsylvania. He earned a BA from Brandeis University in 1971, an MA from the University of California, Berkeley in 1972, and a PhD from the same institution in 1976. Prior to joining Penn, he taught for fifteen years at Dartmouth College and worked for one year in the U.S. Department of State. At Penn, he teaches courses in Middle Eastern politics, comparative politics, and computer modeling. His research interests encompass comparative politics, international politics, Middle Eastern politics, and agent-based computer-assisted modeling for the social sciences. Current projects focus on the implications of the disappearance of a negotiated two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, techniques of counterfactual forecasting, politics of Jewish and non-Jewish migration into and out of Palestine/the Land of Israel, prospects for peace between Israelis and Palestinians, and applications of agent-based modeling to constructivist identity theory.

Lustick has received awards from the Carnegie Corporation, National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, Social Science Research Council, and United States Institute of Peace. 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. He has worked as an analyst or consultant for every American administration since the 1970s on intelligence and national security issues related to the Middle East. His key publications include the books Arabs in the Jewish State (1980), State Building in British Ireland and French Algeria (1985), For the Land and the Lord (1988, 1994), Unsettled States, Disputed Lands (1993), Trapped in the War on Terror (2006), and Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality (2019). Recent articles feature 'Annexation in right-wing Israeli discourse—The case of Ribonut' (Frontiers in Political Science, 2022), 'The Peace Process Carousel: The Israel Lobby and the Failure of American Diplomacy' (Middle East Journal, 2020), and 'What and Where is Israel: Time for a Gestalt Shift' (The One State Reality, 2023). Lustick has lectured at universities across North America, Europe, and the Middle East, contributing significantly to scholarship on Middle Eastern politics and computational social science.

Professional Email: ilustick@sas.upenn.edu