Prof. Yossi Shain holds a dual appointment at Tel Aviv University and at Georgetown University. At Georgetown, he is a professor of Comparative Government and Diaspora Politics and the founding Director of the Program for Jewish Civilization. At Tel Aviv University, he is the Romulo Betancourt Professor of Political Science and Head of the Aba Eben Program of Diplomacy. In 2007, he served pro-bono as President of the Western Galilee College.
Prof. Shain earned his B.A. and M.A degrees from Tel Aviv University and his Ph.D. with distinction from Yale in 1988. Since 1989, he has taught Political Science at Tel Aviv University, where he served as Department Head from 1996 to 1999. He also served as Head of the Hartog School of Government from 2003 to 2007. Prof. Shain has held many visiting professorship appointments at Yale University, Wesleyan University, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and Middlebury College. He was a visiting senior fellow at St. Antony's College in Oxford, and senior visiting fellow at the Center for International Studies at Princeton University. In 2009, he received the Koret visiting professorship at the Hoover Institute. Prior to his appointment as full professor at Georgetown University in 2002, he was the Aaron and Cecile Goldman visiting professor in the Department of Government from 1999 to 2002.
Prof. Shain has won many scholarly awards, including the APSA Helen Dwight Reed Award for his work on exile politics, the International Fulbright, Israel's Allon Fellowship for distinguished young scholars, and fellowships from the French and German governments for his work on nationalism, ethnicity and Diaspora politics.
Prof. Shain is the author of The Frontier of Loyalty: Political Exiles in the Age of the Nation-State (1989; new edition Michigan University Press, 2005); Between States: Interim Governments and Democratic Transitions (with Juan J. Linz, Cambridge University Press, 1995), and Marketing the American Creed Abroad: Diasporas in the U.S. and Their Homelands (Cambridge University Press, 1999), which was awarded the 2000 Best Book of the Year Prize by the Israeli Political Science Association. His latest book is Kinship and Diasporas in International Affairs (Michigan University Press, 2007). Prof. Shain also edited Governments-in-Exile in Contemporary World Politics (Routledge, 1991), and coedited Democracy: the Challenges Ahead (with Aharon Kleiman, St. Martin's, 1997) and Collective Memory in International Affairs (with Eric Langenbacher, forthcoming 2009). Shain is presently writing a book provisionally entitled: Moral Hazards: The Language of Corruption and its Costs in Democracies.
In addition to his books, more than fifty of his articles have been published in edited books and leading academic journals, and he has contributed various essays and commentaries to newspapers and magazines in Israel and in the US. He has been a guest on NBC, ABC, CNN, Fox News, CNBC, and The News Hour, as well as on many radio shows.