Deborah Wheeler is a professor of political science at the US Naval Academy. She holds a doctorate from the University of Chicago where she studied the power of media and pop culture in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She is also a specialist in the impact of the Internet on power and resistance in the Arab world, with two books published on the subject: Internet in the Middle East: Global Expectations and Local Imaginations in Kuwait (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006) and Digital Resilience in the Middle East: New Media Activism in Everyday Life (Edinburgh University Press, 2017).

She has conducted original fieldwork in Israel / Palestine, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia, and the United Arab Emirates and Morocco.

She has been a visiting scholar at Oxford University, Balliol College, Kuwait University, American University in Kuwait, American University in Cairo, and University of Bergen, Norway. This summer, she will be a researcher at the King Faisal Islamic Research and Study Center, where she will conduct research on "Women Driving Change in Saudi Arabia".