William Lafi Youmans is currently an Associate Professor in Residence at Northwestern University in Qatar. He was previously the director of the Institute of Public Diplomacy and Global Communication at GWU. 

Broadly interested in questions of transnationalism, power and communication, his primary research interests include global news, media industries, and politics.  His other areas of research interest include Middle East politics, and Arab American studies.

Youmans wrote a book, Unlikely Audience: Al Jazeera's Struggle in America (Oxford UP), about the Qatari news network's efforts to gain a share of the news market in the United States. He has been quoted in articles that ran in Salon, Washington Post, Newsweek, Variety and The New York Times, among others.  He was a guest on radio and television programs on CBC Radio, WAMU/NPR, Headline News, Al Jazeera English and ARD. He wrote a regular column for Arab American News and The Gulf News, but has also written essays for the Washington Post, Middle East Report, Public Books, and Nieman Journalism Lab.

His paper on CIA recruitment in Arab Detroit won the Best Paper Award in the International Communication Section of the International Studies Association.  It was later published in The Communication Review.

Youmans presented at academic conferences, including the annual gatherings of the Middle East Studies Association, the International Communication Association, the National Communication Association, the International Studies Association, and the American Sociological Association.

Youmans co-directed and co-produced a documentary film about Alex Odeh, a Palestinian American activist who was assassinated in Orange County, CA in 1985. The crime is unsolved and still haunts the local community to this day. Who Killed Alex Odeh? premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival and Berlinale.  The film was a Sundance Building Bridges Completion Fund Grantee and won a U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Journalistic Excellence. It also won the Envision Award -- honoring a film's singular ability to envision a world free of prejudice and hate -- from the Jewish Film Institute. 

He is working on a major video archive of Arab American TV, a weekly television program that ran out of Los Angeles from the early 1980s to the early 2000s.

Youmans obtained his B.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. He also holds a  J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.