Christine van den Toorn is a nonresident senior fellow with the Iraq Initiative in the Atlantic Council’s Middle East programs. She is also the founder and director of Baghdad Business School, a one-year program in English language, business, tech, and professional skills designed to enable Iraqi university graduates to work in the private sector, with over two hundred alumni in its network. She is also the founder and president of the Iraq Fund for Higher Education, a US-based nonprofit foundation dedicated to providing new education and employment opportunities for Iraqi youth, and sits on the board of the Baghdad Foundation for Business Management, an Iraqi-registered nongovernmental organization.
Previously, van den Toorn worked at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani for ten years as executive director of external relations and policy, director of the Institute for Regional and International Studies, and on the faculty. She has published widely about her research around Iraq in outlets such as Carnegie’s Sada, the Iraq Oil Report, The Washington Post, and the London School of Economics, and she has both presented at and organized conferences and roundtables in the United States, Europe, and Iraq. Before moving to Iraq in 2009, van den Toorn completed her master of arts in Middle East history at the University of Virginia. She studied Arabic in Syria at the University of Damascus and the French Institute for Near East Studies, and in the United States at Georgetown University and Middlebury College. She was in the Peace Corps in Morocco.
