Akeel Abbas is a nonresident senior fellow at the Iraq Initiative within the Atlantic Council’s Middle East programs. Abbas is an expert on Iraqi politics and sectarian identities and currently serves as a project manager at the Moja Organization, training reform-minded political and media activists in Iraq.  

From 2022 to 2023, Abbas was a senior fellow at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change in London, where he wrote papers about Iraq and advised senior staff on Iraqi and Middle Eastern issues. He also served as senior outreach development and communications specialist for the US Agency for International Development, working out of the US embassy in Baghdad, Iraq.  

He is a former professor at American University of Iraq, Sulaimani. Before teaching there, Abbas taught research writing, postcolonial studies, global and British literature, and literary theory at several universities in the United States, including Old Dominion University, the University of Houston-Downtown, and Purdue University. 

Abbas also worked for several years as a journalist covering Iraq and the Middle East, appearing as a guest analyst on a number of Arabic-language television programs. Specializing in cultural studies, his research interests include modernity, democratization, the politics of identity, and human rights. 

Abbas received his PhD in cultural studies from Purdue University, an MA in English from Gannon University, and a BA in English from Al-Mustansiraya University in Baghdad, Iraq.