Mia Bloom
Professor Communication, Middle East Studies Center- Education
Columbia University, Ph.D. with Honors December 1999 Political Science; Middle East International Relations/Comparative Politics. Dissertation: “Paved with Good Intentions: The Unintended Consequences of Mixed Messages and the Exacerbation of Ethnic Conflict.” Committee: Jack Snyder, Lisa Anderson, Roy Licklider & Alexander Motyl.
Georgetown University, Masters in Arab Studies (magna cum laude) 1991, School of Foreign Service.
McGill University, Bachelors (Dual Honors) 1989 Russian History, Islamic and Middle East Studies.
- Specializations
International Relations and Comparative Politics with a focus on war and terrorism.
- Biography
Mia Bloom is an International Security Fellow at New America and Professor of communication and Middle East Studies at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Bloom is one of the world’s leading experts on violence and extremism. She has won over 4 million dollars in competitive grants from the Office of Naval Research and conducts research in Europe, the Middle East and South Asia and speaks eight languages. She is the author of six books and over 80 articles on violent extremism including Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror (Columbia 2005), Living Together After Ethnic Killing (Routledge 2007) Bombshell: Women and Terror (UPenn 2011) and Small Arms: Children and Terror (Cornell 2019) and Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon with Sophia Moskalenko (Stanford 2021). Her next book, Veiled Threats: Women and Jihad in expected in 2023. Bloom is a regular contributor to national and international media including CNN, CNN International, ABC, BBC, NBC, al Hurrah and Al Jazeera. She is a former term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and has held teaching or research appointments at Cornell, Harvard, Princeton, and McGill University. She serves on the boards of the Anti-Defamation League Counter Radicalization and Extremism, the UN Counter Terrorism Executive Directorate (UNCTED), and Women Without Borders. Bloom has a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University, a master’s degree in Arab Studies from Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and a Double Honors BA in Russian, Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies from McGill University. She completed a Pre-Doctorate position at Harvard University’s Center for International Studies and a Post-Doctorate from the Center for International Studies at Princeton University.
Research Interests
Terrorism, Child Soldiers, Gender Based Violence and Conspiracy Theories
- Publications
Select Publications
Bloom, M. and Moskalenko, S., (2021). Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon. Stanford University Press. (Selected by the New York Times as a “Top 10 book” August 2021 and Nominated for the 2022 Grawemeyer Award for the best book Improving World Order).Bloom, M. (2019). Small Arms: Children and Terrorism. NY: Cornell University Press. (Nominated for the 2020 Grawemeyer Award for the best book Improving World Order, honorable mention.)
Bloom, M. (2011). Bombshell: Women and Terrorism. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.b. UK: Bombshell: The Many Faces of Women Terrorists. London: Hurst Publications; Toronto: Penguin Press.
c. Netherlands: Dutch Translation: Met volle overtuiging: vrouwen en terreur. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Leitung Press.
Licklider R. & Bloom, M. (eds.), (2006). Living Together After Ethnic Killing, UK: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Press (published in the United States 2007).
Bloom, M. (2005). Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror. NY: Columbia University Press (expanded 2nd edition, June 2007). Updated Audio book released in 2020 for audible.com.Peer Reviewed Articles:
Moskalenko, S., Kates, N., Bloom, M., & Fernández-Garayzábal González, J., (2022) “Predictors of radical intentions among Incels: A survey of 54 self-identified Incels,” Journal of Online Trust and Security.Moskalenko, S., Burton, B., Bloom, M., & Fernández-Garayzábal González, J. (2022). “Secondhand Conspiracy Theories: The Social, Emotional and Political Tolls on Loved Ones of QAnon Followers,” Democracy and Security, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17419166.2022.2111305?src
Bloom, M. (2022) “The First Incel? The Legacy of Marc Lépine.” Journal of Intelligence Conflict and Warfare. Vol 5 #1 2022 https://doi.org/10.21810/jicw.v5i1.4214
Buntain, C, Deal Barlow, M., Johns, M. & Bloom, M. (2022) “Paved with Bad Intentions: QAnon’s #SavetheChildren Campaign.” Journal of Online Trust and Safety 1(2) Stanford, https://doi.org/ 10.54501/jots.v1i2.51Joseph, K. Benigni, M., Wei, W. Carley, K.M., and Bloom, M., (2022) War or Adaptation? Arab Spring
Stories in News and Twitter. IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10588-017-9255-3
Ellis, H. B, Cardeli, E, Bloom, M. and Weine, S., (2021) “Understanding the needs of children returning from ISIS controlled territories through an Emotional Security Theory lens: Implications for practice,” Child Abuse & Neglect vol. 109 November 2020 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2020.104754
Bloom, M. (2021). “Conducting Field Research in the Time of Corona.” PS Special Issue with Ora Szekely and Peter Krause doi:10.1017/S1049096520001754
Bloom, M. & Lokmanoglu, A., (2020) “From Pawns to Knights: Changing Role of Women’s Agency in Terrorism.” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1057610X.2020.1759263?journalCode=uter20
Abeysinghe, B., M. Bloom, and R. Sunderraman, (2019) “Localizing Assault Rifles in ISIS Propaganda Images; Experiments of a semantic segmentation approach.” Transactions on Computational Social Systems IEEE.
Cardeli, E., Bloom, M., Gillespie, S., Zayed, T., & Ellis, H.B., (2019). “Exploring the Social-Ecological Factors that Mobilize Children Into Violence” Terrorism and Political Violence. Print ed. May 2022. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09546553.2019.1701444