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He joined AUC in 1971 and has served as Chair of the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, Psychology, and Egyptology and on a wide range of university committees, including Chair of the University Senate. He has also taught at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and the University of Texas at Austin and has been a Visiting Researcher at the Center for Contemporary Arab studies at Georgetown University. He is a member of the American Anthropological Association, and is a former member of the Board of Directors of the AAA’s Middle East Section. Cole is also a member of the Saudi Association of Sociology and Social Work.

Dr. Cole received his B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin, where he studied Spanish, government, and institutional economics. After a year in Bolivia as a Fulbright scholar, he studied at the University of California, Berkeley, where he received an M.A. and Ph.D. in anthropology. For his dissertation, he conducted 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork among Bedouin nomads in the Empty Quarter and Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia.

Dr. Cole has a record spanning more than three decades of academic and development-oriented research in Saudi Arabia and in Egypt. He is the author of Nomads of the Nomads: The Al Murrah Bedouin of the Empty Quarter (1975), co-author with Soraya Altorki of Arabian Oasis City: The Transformation of ‘Unayzah (1989) and Bedouin, Settlers, and Holiday-Makers: Egypt’s Changing Northwest Coast (1998), and co-author with Naiem Sherbiny and Nadia Makary Girgis of Investors and Workers in the Western Desert of Egypt: An Exploratory Survey (1992). His interests range from kinship and social organization to political economy, cultural studies, the Arab World, Latin America, and the world system.