Hello and welcome! I’m currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I also serve as Faculty Director for the Middle East Studies Program. I’m also a faculty fellow with the Association for Analytic Learning about Islam and Muslim Societies (AALIMS). I received my Ph.D. from the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin in August 2015, held a post-doctoral fellowship at the Belfer Center’s Middle East Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School during the 2015-2016 academic year, and from 2015 to 2019 I was on the faculty at the University of Louisville. You can download my current C.V. here, and email me at sbrooke [at] wisc [dot] edu.

I’m a comparativist by training with a regional specialization in the Middle East, but I have also begun to range more widely in order to study the questions that interest me. Substantively, I specialize in religion and politics, non-democratic regimes and oppositions, social service provision, and political violence. My first book, Winning Hearts and Votes: Social Services and the Islamist Political Advantage, was published by Cornell University Press in 2019 and won the APSA Middle East Section’s “Best Book by a First Time Author” award. My second book, Protection at the Margins: How the Catholic Church Shielded Communities from Populist Violence in the Philippine Drug War, co-authored with David Buckley, was recently published by Cambridge University Press. You can check out my research page to see more about my published and in-the-pipeline projects.