Speaker biographies
Christopher DeMuth is the president of AEI. Before coming to AEI in 1986, he was managing director of Lexecon, Inc., an economics consulting firm (1984–86); editor and publisher of Regulation magazine (1986–87); administrator for regulatory affairs at the U.S. Office of Management and Budget and executive director of the Presidential Task Force on Regulatory Relief in the Reagan administration (1981–84); lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government and director of the Harvard Faculty Project on Regulation (1977–81); and a lawyer in private practice (1973–77). His articles on government regulation and other subjects have appeared in The Public Interest, the Harvard Law Review, The Yale Journal on Regulation, the Wall Street Journal, Commentary, The American Enterprise, and elsewhere.
Lee Harris is the author of Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History and a frequent contributor to Policy Review, the Wall Street Journal’s OpinionJournal, and other publications, in print and online.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an outspoken defender of women’s rights in Islamic societies, was born in Mogadishu, Somalia. She escaped an arranged marriage by immigrating to the Netherlands in 1992, and she served as a member of the Dutch parliament from 2003 to 2006. In parliament, she worked on furthering the integration of non-Western immigrants into Dutch society and defending the rights of women in Dutch Muslim communities. In 2004, she made Submission with director Theo van Gogh, a film about the oppression of women in conservative Islamic cultures. The airing of the film on Dutch television resulted in the assassination of van Gogh by an Islamic extremist. Her 2007 memoir, Infidel, was a New York Times bestseller. At AEI, Ms. Hirsi Ali researches the relationship between the West and Islam, women’s rights in Islam, violence against women propagated by religious and cultural arguments, and Islam in Europe. She is currently working on her next book, Shortcut to Enlightenment.
