About Me

My name is Daniel Stoker and I am a professor of Middle East history at a small university in east Idaho. I love my job, food, travel, and all things Middle East. My path to my current profession was a bit unorthodox. I grew up in small farming town in eastern Washington state where life revolved arounds high school sports, farming, and fishing. The son of two teachers (elementary school, and English literature), I wasn’t much of a farmer or fisherman, but I loved football. For most of my adolescence, I was sure my destiny was to ultimately coach football at my high school and there was nothing I wanted more.

My Path

After high school, I served an LDS mission in Texas. In Texas I had my first encounters with Muslims and just before I returned home the events of 9/11 rocked the world. For the next four years I majored in social studies education with the goal of becoming a stereotypical high school football coach who moonlights as a history teacher.

The semester before I was to graduate, I enrolled in a class on Middle East history. I had found the subject intriguing and figured it would be a fun class, but by the end of the semester I couldn’t get enough. After graduating, I read book after book on the region and took trips Turkey and the Levant. Just shy of thirty, I did something reckless, I quit my job as a teacher and enrolled in Arabic at Brigham Young University.

A Leap of Faith

I was hopelessly hooked in the Middle East and continuing my practice of reading everything I could get my hands on wasn’t enough. While studying Arabic, I applied to grad schools and I was fortunate enough to get into the Middle East Studies MA program at the American University in Cairo. Despite having never been to Cairo, I jumped at the chance and just four fateful months before the outbreak of the Arab Spring, I boarded a plane for Egypt.

I graduated in 2012, and bounced around a couple of internships at Project on Middle East Democracy (now the Middle East Democracy Center), the Atlantic Council, and the Middle East Institute. I eventually landed a job on a US govt. contract as a subject matter expert covering Syria. I later worked as an analyst covering Egypt at the Defense Intelligence Agency.

  • Historically, the term Maghreb referred to the Islamic region of North Africa. The term Mashriq is a term Arabs use to describe the eastern Arabic speaking world including the Levant and Arabian Peninsula.

  • During my graduate studies I focused on the development of national identity among the Druze community in the Golan Heights. My other interests include the politics of the Shi’a community in Lebanon, and the politics of Arab Nationalism in the 1950s and 1960s.

    • Arabic 101/102

    • Modern History of the Middle East

    • Middle East History to 1800

    • Middle Eastern Cultures

    • History of Israel/Palestine

    • World History to 1500

    • World History after 1500