Steven Simon is a Senior Analyst at the Quincy Institute and Professor in the Practice of International Relations at Colby College, following stints as John J. McCloy ’16 Professor of History at Amherst College and lecturer in government at Dartmouth College. Prior to this, he was Executive Director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies for the US and Middle East.  From 2011 to 2012 he served on the National Security Council staff as senior director for Middle Eastern and North African affairs. He also worked on the NSC staff 1994 – 1999 on counterterrorism and Middle East security policy. These assignments followed a fifteen-year career at the U.S. Department of State.

Between government assignments, he was a principal at Good Harbor Consulting, LLC in Abu Dhabi; Goldman Sachs & Co. visiting professor at Princeton University; Hasib Sabbagh senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations; analyst at the RAND Corporation; and deputy director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

He is the co-author, among other books, of “The Age of Sacred Terror,” winner of the Arthur C. Ross Award for best book in international relations; “The Next Attack,” a finalist for the Lionel Gelber Prize, and one of the “best books of the year” in the Washington Post and Financial Times; “Iraq at the Crossroads: State and Society in the Shadow of Regime Change;” and “The Sixth Crisis ; The Pragmatic Superpower: The United States and the Middle East in the Cold War; Our Separate Ways.” He is now working on a new book, “The Long Goodbye: The United States and the Middle East from the Islamic Revolution to the Arab Spring.”