David Mednicoff
Assistant Professor of Public Policy
Director, Accelerated Degree Programs, Center for Public Policy and Adminstration
Director, Middle Eastern Studies

Address:
Center for Public Policy & Administration
120 Gordon Hall
418 North Pleasant Street
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Amherst, MA 01002-1735

Phone: (413) 545-3536
Email: mednic@pubpol.umass.edu

Ph.D. in Political Science: Harvard University
J.D., Harvard University Law School (Honors)
A.M., Political Science, Harvard University
A.B., Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University

Middle Eastern politics, law and public policy; US foreign policy; international and comparative law and politics; human rights; globalization theory

Prof. David Mednicoff  directs the Master's in Public Policy and Middle Eastern Studies programs at the University of Massachusetts -- Amherst. His areas of expertise include Middle Eastern law and politics, international law, human rights, globalization studies and comparative public policy. 

Prof. Mednicoff's publications and ongoing research deal broadly with interdisciplinary connections between legal and political ideas and institutions at the national and transnational levels, particularly as these relate to current policy issues in the Middle East. One of these projects, on the meanings and political implications of the rule of law in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, is funded by a $1 million grant from the Qatar National Research Fund through 2016. He is currently completing two book manuscripts on the politics of the rule of law, democratization and US foreign policy in five Arab societies. He also has written on Arab constitutional politics and Islam before and after the events of 2011, the legal regulation of migrant workers in the Arab Gulf, human rights in the Middle East and humanitarian intervention. He has been invited to present his work at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the US Department of State, the Saudi Arabia Institute of Diplomatic Studies, and Georgetown, Harvard, Stanford and Yale Universities, among other places. 

Prof. Mednicoff's teaching honors include a university-wide Lilly Teaching Fellowship for promising junior faculty, the U. Mass. College of Social and Behavioral Sciences Outstanding Teacher Award, and a national prize for innovative teaching related to the US after 9/11/01. Prof. Mednicoff was a Fulbright Senior Scholar in law in Qatar in 2006-7, where he taught legal and political philosophy at Qatar University. He was a Research Fellow in 2010-11 in the Dubai Initiative at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He will hold a Fellowship at the ZIF (Institute for Advanced Study) in Bielefeld, Germany in 2014 as a member of a research group on Religion and Human Rights in Constitution-Writing. He writes and comments frequently for the media.