Professional Affiliation

Middle East Specialist, Department of State; Adjunct Professor, Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service

Expert Bio

Dr. Grace Wermenbol serves as a Middle East Specialist at the Department of State, with a particular focus on the Middle East Peace Process and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She is also an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service and a Global Fellow at the Wilson Center’s Middle East Program. Previously, she was a Non-Resident Scholar at the Middle East Institute’s Program on Palestine and Palestinian-Israeli Affairs. The Middle East Policy Council listed her in their 40 Under 40 awards for influential Middle East experts in 2023.

Prior to joining the State Department, Dr. Wermenbol was a Middle East Director at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, where she served both on the National Intelligence Management Council and, more recently, the National Intelligence Council. Earlier in her career, she lectured at the University of Oxford, where she taught on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and was a researcher at Oxford’s Department of Politics and International Relations. 

Dr. Wermenbol is the author of A Tale of Two Narratives (Cambridge University Press, 2021), a study of Israeli and Palestinian societies in the post-Oslo era, and a contributor to the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ 2020 and 2021 Armed Conflict Surveys (Routledge). She received her DPhil and master’s from the University of Oxford, St Antony’s College. The views represented here are her own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of State or the U.S. Government.

Expertise

• Conflict Resolution 
• Peacebuilding
• Education 
• Governance 
• History 
• Human Rights 
• International Development 
• Security and Defense 
• Society and Culture