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Jonathan Laurence is Director of the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy, Professor of Political Science at Boston College, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and an affiliate of the Center for European Studies at Harvard University. From 2003-2018, he was Nonresident Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy studies at the Brookings Institution. Since 2018, he has served on the board of Reset Dialogues US. 

Jonathan has held visiting appointments in Paris, Rome, Berlin, New York, and Washington and conducted research across Western Europe, Turkey, and North Africa. His essays and commentary on international affairs appear in US and European periodicals and news media, and he gives occasional lectures in international academic and policy settings.

Laurence is the author of Coping with Defeat: Islam, Catholicism and the Modern State (Princeton 2021), which presents a historical panorama of the Islamic and Catholic political-religious empires and exposes striking parallels in their relationship with the modern state. He is also the author of The Emancipation of Europe’s Muslims (Princeton, 2012), which was named the American Political Science Association's Best Book on Citizenship and Migration and Best Book on Religion and Politics in 2013.

Laurence is co-author of Integrating Islam (with Justin Vaïsse, Brookings, 2006), one of the first English-language books about Islam in contemporary France, which was named an Outstanding Title by the American Library Association and was translated into French (Odile Jacob, 2007). Laurence was a Berlin prize fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, a Norway Research Council fellow and visiting fellow at CERI-Sciences Po (Paris), a senior fellow at the Transatlantic Academy at the German Marshall Fund, and a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.  He has also been a guest researcher at Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin, a visiting professor at Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali (LUISS) Guido Carli in Rome, a Council on the US and Italy visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a guest researcher at New York University and at Sciences Po-Paris.

After graduating from the Dalton School, he completed undergraduate work summa cum laude at Cornell University (B.A.) and received a Certificat d’Etudes Politiques at Sciences Po – Paris. Laurence received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and was awarded the American Political Science Association’s Harold D. Lasswell Prize for best Ph.D. dissertation on public policy.