Mia Bloom is Professor of Communication and Middle East Studies at Georgia State University. She conducts ethnographic field research in Europe, the Middle East and South Asia and speaks eight languages. She has authored 6 books and around 70 articles on terrorism and violent extremism, including Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror (2005), Living Together After Ethnic Killing [with Roy Licklider] (2007), Bombshell: Women and Terror (2011) and Small Arms: Children and Terror (2019). She has 2 forthcoming books this year, entitled Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon [with Sophia Moskalenko] (Stanford) and Veiled Threats: Women and Jihad (2021). She is a former term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and has held research or teaching appointments at Princeton, Cornell, Harvard and McGill Universities.
Under the auspices of the Minerva Research Initiative (MRI) of the Department of Defense, Bloom is currently conducting research on how conspiracy theories go viral and are weaponized. Bloom has a PhD in political science from Columbia University, a Masters in Arab Studies from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and a Bachelors degree from McGill University in Russian, Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies.
