Jennifer Bryson

Jennifer Bryson was a visiting fellow at Hudson Institute.

Dr. Bryson was most recently the director of the Islam and religious freedom team at the Religious Freedom Institute. She was founding-director at the Zephyr Institute and worked at the Witherspoon Institute.

From 2010 to 2017 she taught part-time at the U.S. Army War College. From late 2001 to 2008 she worked for the U.S. Department of Defense. Her assignments included strategic outreach to media and civil society institutions in Egypt and Yemen, working at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and serving on the Policy staff of the Office of the Secretary of Defense. While working for DIA, she was an interrogator at Guantanamo from 2004 to 2006; for this work, she twice received the Defense Civilian Meritorious Service Award. Her research interests include interrogation as well as the intersection of religion with conflict and political freedoms.

Dr. Bryson holds a B.A. degree in political science from Stanford University and an M.A. in medieval Christian intellectual history and a Ph.D. in near eastern languages and civilizations from Yale University. While she was an undergraduate at Stanford, she studied Marxism-Leninism for two semesters at the Karl Marx University in the former East Germany.