Steven Heydemann is a political scientist whose research focuses on democratization and economic reform in the Middle East, and on the relationship between institutions and economic development more broadly. Heydemann received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1990. From 1990-1997 he worked as director of the SSRC Program on International Peace and Security, and the Program on the Near and Middle East. From 1997-2001 he held the position of associate professor in the department of political science at Columbia University. Heydemann rejoined the SSRC in 2001 as director of the Program on Philanthropy and Nonprofit Studies, with additional responsibility for the development of new programs.

Heydemann has also spent time as visiting professor at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute in Florence (2001), and as a senior fellow at the Yale University Center for International Studies (1997). Heydemann has served on the board of directors of the Middle East Studies Association of North America, and of the Foundation on Democratization and Political Change in the Middle East. He has also been a member of the Middle East Studies Association's Committee on Academic Freedom in the Middle East and North Africa.

Heydemann recently completed a multi-year collaborative research project on informal networks and the politics of economic reform in the Middle East, supported by the Mediterranean Program of the European University Institute. The edited volume resulting from this project, Networks of Privilege: The Politics of Economic Reform in the Middle East, was published by Palgrave Press in 2004. He is the author of Authoritarianism in Syria: Institutions and Social Conflict, 1946-1970 (Cornell University Press, 1999), and the editor of War, Institutions and Social Change in the Middle East (University of California Press, 2000). He is also the author of articles and book chapters on processes of democratic reform in the Middle East, including, recently, “In the Shadow of Democracy,” an invited review essay that appeared in the Middle East Journal, Vol. 60, No. 1 (Winter 2006); "La question de la democratie dans les travaux sur le monde arabe," which appeared in Critique Internationale in October 2002, and "Middle East Studies After 9/11: Defending the Discipline" published in the Journal of Democracy in July 2002.