Lecturers at the Jefferson Educational Society

• Aaron David Miller is currently the Vice President for New Initiatives and a Distinguished Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Between 2006 and 2008, he was a Public Policy Scholar when he wrote his fourth book The Much Too Promised Land: America's Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace (Bantam, 2008). His other books include The Arab States and the Palestine Question: Between Ideology and Self Interest, The PLO and the Politics of Survival, and The Search for Security, Saudi Arabian Oil and American Foreign Policy.

For the prior two decades, he served at the Department of State as an advisor to Republican and Democratic Secretaries of State, where he helped formulate U.S. policy on the Middle East and the Arab-Israel peace process, most recently as the Senior Advisor for Arab-Israeli Negotiations. He also served as the Deputy Special Middle East Coordinator for Arab-Israeli Negotiations, Senior Member of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and in the Office of the Historian. He has received the department's Distinguished, Superior, and Meritorious Honor Awards.

Mr. Miller received his Ph.D. in American Diplomatic and Middle East History from the University of Michigan in 1977 and joined the State Department the following year. During 1982 and 1983, he was a Council on Foreign Relations fellow and a resident scholar at the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies. In 1984 he served a temporary tour at the American Embassy in Amman, Jordan. Between 1998 and 2000, Mr. Miller served on the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. After leaving the state department, Mr. Miller served as president of Seeds of Peace from January 2003 until January 2006. Seeds of Peace is a nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering young leaders from regions of conflict with the leadership skills required to advance reconciliation and coexistence (www.seedsofpeace.org).

His media and speaking appearances include CNN (including "American Morning," "Wolf Blitzer Reports,") "The Newshour with Jim Lehrer," FOX News, "The NBC Nightly News," "CBS Evening News," National Public Radio, the BBC, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Al Arabiya, and Al Jazeera. Mr. Miller has also been a featured presenter for the World Economic Forum in Davos and Amman, Harvard University, Columbia University, New York University, University of California at Berkeley, The City Club of Cleveland, Chatham House, and The International Institute for Strategic Studies. His articles have appeared in newspapers, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and The International Herald Tribune.