Mark Farha is Visiting Assistant Professor at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service in Doha. He currently is teaching the core class Comparative Political Systems as well as a colloquium entitled Globalization and Geopolitics of the Middle East.

Born and raised in Zurich Switzerland as a dual citizen of the United States and Switzerland, Farha graduated in 1997 with honors from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Washington DC. After receiving a Masters in Theology from Harvard Divinity School in 1999, he graduated in 2007 from Harvard University with a Ph.D. in History and Middle Eastern Studies. From 1999-2005, he served as the Head Teaching Fellow for the Core Classes “Social Analysis 36: Religion and Modernization” as well as “FC 17: Thought and Change in the Contemporary Middle East.” For both classes, he was awarded with the “Harvard University Certificate of Distinction in Teaching.”

His inaugural presentation at Columbia University’s Religion and Democracy Seminar Series “From Beirut Spring to Regional Winter?” was published in Breaking the Cycle: Civil Wars in Lebanon (London: Stacey International, 2007). His most recently published article is “Democracy and Demography in Lebanon,” Middle East Monitor, Vol.3, No.1, 2008 which is being reprinted in expanded form as a chapter in Lebanon: Liberation, Conflict and Crisis, ed. Barry Rubin, (NY: Palgrave Macmillan, March 2009).

Farha is currently drafting the manuscript for his first book entitled Secularism Under Siege in Lebanon: Global and Regional Dimensions of a Malaise. His article “The Consociational Model in Historical Comparison: A Review of Cliché and Reality of The Two Switzerlands” is currently under review for publication. His forthcoming articles include a comparative study on “Global Gradations of Secularism,” a study of the evolution of private and public schools in Lebanon, a genealogy of political secularism in the Arab world as well as a historical investigation into the origins of the longstanding confessional underpinnings informing US Presidential Middle East policy entitled “Not Beyond Belief: US Middle East Bias from Blackstone to Bush.”