David W. Lesch, Professor and Chair | PhD

David Lesch is Professor of Middle East History in the Department of History. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. (1991) in History and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University. In May of 2008, Dr. Lesch was recognized by Trinity for his outstanding research. Click here to view narrative.

Publications

• A Journey through Syria in Time and Place (forthcoming)
• Historical Dictionary of Syria (co-author), Scarecrow Press, 2012
• The Middle East and the United States: History, Politics and Ideology (co-editor), Westview Press, 2011
• Syrian Foreign Policy and the United States: From Bush to Obama (co-author), Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2009.
• The Arab-Israeli Conflict: A History, Oxford University Press, 2007
• The New Lion of Damascus: Bashar al-Asad and Modern Syria, Yale University Press, 2005
• Syria and the United States: Eisenhower's Cold War in the Middle East, Westview Press, 1992
• The Middle East and the United States: A Historical and Political Reassessment (editor, Westview Press, 1996, 1999, 2003, 4th edition, 2006)
• 1979: The Year that Shaped the Modern Middle East, Westview Press, 2001
• History in Dispute: The Middle East Since 1945, Volume 14, First Series, St. James Press, 2003.
• History in Dispute: The Middle East Since 1945, Volume 15, Second Series, St. James Press, 2003

Lesch has published numerous articles in leading journals in the field and chapters in books. He has had opinion essays published in The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Washington Post, The New York Daily News, Foreign Policy, and many other outlets and has been quoted in over 150 newspapers and magazines worldwide. Dr. Lesch has frequently commented on Middle East issues on local and network radio and television programs as well as such national and international broadcasts as The History Channel, CNN, CNBC, Fox News, MSNBC, Al-Jazeera, the Australian Broadcast Company, and the Canadian Broadcast Company and he is a regular commentator on National Public Radio, Christian Science Monitor Radio, BBC and CBS Radio. He has traveled widely in the Middle East and Europe on scholarly, business, and diplomatic endeavors, and he is a frequent consultant to various U.S. government departments. Dr. Lesch has often testified on Middle East subject matter in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House International Affairs Committee. In addition, he has appeared at and been a consultant to the United Nations on a variety of Middle East issues, including for then UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan as well as the foreign ministers of The Netherlands and Spain. Dr. Lesch has also met on a regular basis since 2004 with Syrian President Bashar al-Asad and consulted with Bush and Obama administration officials on an on-going basis in high-level attempts to improve US-Syrian relations.

Dr. Lesch was also president of Middle East International Business Associates, Inc., a consulting company that facilitated business opportunities in the Middle East for American companies--among his clients were a number of Fortune 500 corporations. He was also the number one draft pick of the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball club in 1980 as a pitcher.

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