Fall 2007-8

Past Activities and Events

Sponsored and Co-sponsored Lectures for year 2007-2008:

May 26, 2008: Dr. Maureen Fiedler, "God as a Running Mate: Religion and the 2008 American Elections"

Maureen Fiedler is the host of Interfaith Voices, an hour-long radio show, heard on over forty public and community radio stations in the U.S. and Canada. She has been involved in interfaith activities for more than three decades as an active participant in coalitions working for social justice, racial and gender equality, and peace. Dr. Fielder's special interests lie

at the intersection of theology and public policy. She served for twenty-six years as a Co-Director of the Quixote Center, a national faith-based justice center located near Washington, DC. She is co-editor of Rome Has Spoken: A Guide to Forgotten Papal Statements, and How They Have Changed Through the Centuries (1998). It demonstrates how papal positions on major issues, ranging from ecumenism to slavery to the roles of women, have changed substantively over time. Dr. Fielder is often a guest for discussions of religious issues on national radio and television, including the Jim Lehrer News Hour, CNN, and National Public Radio. She is a Sister of Loretto, and holds a Ph.D. in Government from Georgetown University in Washington, DC.

May 22, 2008: Dr. Dell Upton, "Memorials to the Second Civil War"

To access the video recording for this lecture, please click on: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hm2l8CKP4rc&feature=user

Dell Upton is David A. Harrison Professor of Architecture and Anthropology and Chair of the Department of Architectural History at the University of Virginia. Dr. Upton is interested in the ways that cultural, social, aesthetic, and cognitive theories can enrich the study of architectural history.

His five books and many articles range from a study of colonial Virginia churches to critiques of New Urbanism and heritage tourism to, most recently, Architecture in the United States, a volume in the Oxford History of Art series. In recent years, his scholarly work has focused on urban life and culture. He was a consultant and principle catalogue essayist for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825-1861 (2000). His Another City: American Urban Life and Urban Spaces, 1790-1850 will be published by Yale University Press in 2008. He is currently working on a book on civil-rights memorials and urban politics in the American South and on a world history of architecture. His areas of expertise are world architecture; American architecture, urbanism and cultural landscapes; material culture; and African-American cultural landscapes.

May 12, 2008: Dr. Saree Makdisi, "The Question of Palestine in America"
This lectures was cancelled due to political situation in Lebanon.

Saree Makdisi is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles.

His primary area of academic expertise is the culture of modernity in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain, though he has also published numerous articles on contemporary Arab cultural politics. He is the author of Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 1998); William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (University of Chicago Press, 2003); and is the co-editor, with Felicity Nussbaum, of The Arabian Nights in Historical Context: Between East and West (Oxford University Press, 2008). He is currently working on a new book, Radical Afterlives: Britain, 1798-1870. In addition to his scholarly work, Professor Makdisi is also a well known commentator on the question of Palestine, about which he has written extensively for a number of publications, including the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, The Nation, the Houston Chronicle, and the London Review of Books. His most recent book is Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation (Norton, 2008), which offers what Archbishop Desmond Tutu calls "a compelling account of the lives of ordinary Palestinians suffering under occupation."

May 6, 2008: Dr. Malini Johar Scheuller, "Beauty Without Borders and (Other) Feminisms"

Malini Johar Schueller is Professor of English at the University of Florida. She is the author of The Politics of Voice: Liberalism and Social Criticism from Franklin to Kingston (1992), U.S. Orientalisms: Race, Nation, and Gender in Literature, 1790–1890 (1998) and co-editor of Messy Beginnings:

Postcoloniality and Early American Studies (with Edward Watts, 2003) and Exceptional State: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the New Imperialism (with Ashley Dawson, 2007). Recently, she has edited a special issue of Social Text entitled “The Perils of Academic Freedom.” Her latest book, Locating Race: Global Sites of Post-Colonial Citizenship will be published by SUNY press in 2009. Her essays have appeared in several journals such as American Literature, American Literary History, Modern Fiction Studies, Cultural Critique, Genders, and Criticism. She also writes political commentaries for Counterpunch.

April 22, 2008: Dr. Jack Shaheen, "Hollywood's Reel Bad Arabs: Problems and Prospects"

To access the video recording for this lecture, please click on: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlbXorXEFT0&feature=user
Professor Jack Shaheen is an internationally acclaimed author and media critic. An Oxford Research Scholar and former CBS news consultant on Middle East Affairs, Shaheen’s lectures

Dr. Jack Shaheen

and writings illustrate that damaging racial and ethnic stereotypes of Asians, blacks, Native Americans and others injure innocent people. Dr. Shaheen is the recipient of two Fulbright teaching awards and holds degrees from the Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pennsylvania State University, and the University of Missouri. He is the author of five books: Nuclear War Films, Arab and Muslim Stereotyping in American Popular Culture, The TV Arab, the award-winning book and film Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People, and most recently, Guilty: Hollywood's Verdict on Arabs after 9/11. Professor Shaheen has given over 1,000 lectures all over the US and in three continents. He has numerous publications in journals such as Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. He is the recipient of several awards such as The University of Pennsylvania’s Janet Lee Stevens Award; the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee’s Lifetime Achievement, and the Pancho Be Award for “the advancement of humanity.”

April 16, 2008: Dr. Theresa Alfaro-Velcamp, "The Lebanese Abroad: Leaving and Locating the Levant in Mexican History"

Theresa Alfaro-Velcamp is an Associate Professor of History at Sonoma State University in California. Her latest book, ‘So Far From Allah, So Close to Mexico’: Middle Eastern Immigrants in Modern Mexico, was published in 2007 by the University of Texas Press. In 2006, she published articles on immigrant

positioning in Mexico and Mexican cinema in the Hispanic American Historical Review and The Americas. Dr. Alfaro-Velcamp has also published on Lebanese immigrant women, Muslims in Mexico, and Arab populations in Argentina and Latin America.

April 3, 2008: Ali Abunimah, "After Bush: Will US Policy Towards the Middle East Change?"
To access the video recording for this lecture, please click on: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOknO43DRCY&feature=user

Ali Abunimah

Ali Abunimah received his BA from Princeton University and his MA from the University of Chicago. He is the co-founder of the Electronic Intifada, an online publication about Palestine and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict (electronicintifada.net). Currently, over 60,000 individuals all over the world, but mostly in the United States, read its publication every month. Abunimah is the author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse, (Metropolitan Books, 2006) and has contributed to several other volumes. In addition, Abunimah has published numerous articles in The Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Financial Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Jordan Times among other publications. He is a frequent guest on local, national, and international radio and television.

April 1, 2008: Omar Blaik, "Urban Anchors, Models of Engagement"
To access the video recording for this lecture, please click on: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sOpvtyHhKo&feature=user

Omar Blaik

Omar Blaik is chief executive and president of U3 Ventures, a real estate development and advisory company in Philadelphia that focuses on urban development near universities. Before forming the company in 2006, he spent 10 years at the University of Pennsylvania, most recently as senior vice president for facilities and real estate services.

March 18, 2008: Dr. Hisham Ahmed, "American Foreign Policy toward Palestine before 1948: Reflections on Palestinian Self-Determination Today"

To access the video recording for this lecture, please click on: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyUYyYVFYZc

Hisham Ahmed is Associate Professor of Political Science at St. Mary's College of California. He earned his PhD in Political Science at the University of California Santa Barbara. His most recent publications include “Palestinian Resistance

Dr. Hisham Ahmed

and ‘Suicide Bombing’: Causes and Consequences,” (in Tore Bjorgo, ed. Root Causes of Terrorism: Myths, Reality and Ways Forward) and “The Evolution of Hamas in Palestinian Society: Domestic, Regional and International Determinants,” (in L. Sergio German eds. Pathways Out of Terrorism and Insurgency: The Dynamics of Terrorist Violence and Peace Processes). In addition to his frequent contributions to the online journal Bitterlemons and Al-Ayyam newspaper, he is a frequent guest speaker on a variety of international and local Arabic and English TV stations and other news media, such as CNN, MacNeil-Lehrer Report, BBC World Service, Aljazeera, New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Herald Tribune, Boston Globe, Miami Herald, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal and The Economist. In 2005 he was selected as an interlocutor to conduct extensive interviews with all seven Palestinian presidential candidates, including President Mahmoud Abbas, on Palestine TV.

March 13, 2008: Dr. Jeffrey Alexander, "The "War on Terror" between the Sacred and the Profane"

Jeffrey C. Alexander is the Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology at Yale University. His work is primarily in the areas of theory, culture and politics. He is the author of more than ten books, including The Civil Sphere (2006) and The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology (2003).

He is also the editor or co-editor of nineteen volumes and author of over 130 scholarly articles. Dr. Alexander is currently the co-editor of two journals and on the editorial board of ten others. He has received fellowships from Yale, Stanford, Princeton, the Ford Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation. His works have been translated into many languages, and he has important international associations with China, Sweden, Poland, Finland, Germany, Italy, and Canada.

March 11, 2008: Dr. Lawrence Hatab, "Democracy and Conflict Reflections on American Politics and the Prospects for Democracy in the Arab and Muslim World"
To access the video recording for this lecture, please click on: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkMRFX-RypQ
Lawrence Hatab is Louis I. Jaffe Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. He received his PhD from Fordham University in 1976. While his research encompasses Ancient Greek

Dr. Lawrence Hatab

Philosophy, Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy and Philosophy of Religion, his emphasis is on 19^th and 20^th century Continental Philosophy, particularly Nietzsche and Heidegger. In addition to a forthcoming book, Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality (Cambridge University Press), he is the author of five books, including his most recent, Nietzsche’s Life Sentence: Coming to Terms With Eternal Recurrence (Routledge 2005) and Ethics and Finitude: Heideggerian Contributions to Moral Philosophy (Rowman & Littlefield 2000). A prolific contributor of articles and essays, his work has been published in journals such as, Epoche: A Journal for the History of Philosophy, Continental Philosophy Review, Journal of Nietzsche Studies and International Philosophical Quarterly. He has received numerous nominations and awards for outstanding teaching.

March 11, 2008: Dr. Chad Parker, "Partners in Progress: The Arabian American Oil Company, Corporate Diplomacy, and American Modernization in Saudi Arabia"
This lecture is co-sponsored with the Department of History and Archaeology

Chad Parker is a PhD candidate, Indiana University, in History and American Foreign relations. His thesis, due to be defended later this year, is on "Transports of Progress: The Arabian American Oil Company and Modernization in Saudi Arabia, 1945-1973."

February 19, 2008: Dr. Ruth Gilmore, "Understanding America's Addiction to Prisons"
Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Chair of the American Studies and Ethnicity Department (ASE) at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where she is Associate Professor of ASE and Geography. In addition to her new book,

Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (University of California Press), recent publications include: "In the Shadow of the Shadow State" (in Incite! Women of Color Against Violence, eds. The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, March 2007, South End Press), and "Forgotten Places and the Seeds of Grassroots Planning" (in Charles R. Hale, ed., Engaging Contradictions, forthcoming, University of California Press). The American Studies Association (U.S.) recently elected her to a three year term on the national council. She serves on the board of the Economic Roundtable. In addition, she is a founding member of the anti-prison groups California Prison Moratorium Project and Critical Resistance, and past-president of the Central California Environmental Justice Network. Awards include a Soros Senior Justice Fellowship, The James Blaut Award for Critical Geography, the Ralph Santiago Abascal Award for Economic and Environmental Justice, and a USC-Mellon Award for Excellence in Mentoring Graduate Students.

December 18, 2007: Dr. Daniel Mirza, "Are Lives a Substitute for livelihoods? Terrorism, Security, and U.S. Bilateral Imports

Dr. Daniel Mirza is an associate professor of economics at the University of Rennes 1 (France) and a research fellow at the Centre d'Etudes de Prospectives et d'Information Internationales (CEPII, Paris) and at the Globalization and Economic Policy

Center (GEP, Nottingham university, UK). Dr. Mirza, a Lebanese-French national, received his PhD in Economics from the University of Paris 1 Sorbonne in 2001. His main research interests are Labor Markets and International Trade; international transport and transaction costs of trade; and Conflicts and International Trade. He has already published in several international academic journals and served as consultant for the World Bank and the OECD.

The Great Unraveling: US Foreign Policy in the post-Cold War Middle East
December 18, 2007: Dr. Juan Cole, "The Great Unraveling: US Foreign Policy in the post-Cold War Middle East"

Professor Juan Cole is Professor of Modern Middle East and South Asian History at the History Department of the University of Michigan. He has written extensively about modern Islamic movements in Egypt, the Persian Gulf, and South Asia. He has given numerous media and press interviews on the War on Terrorism since September 11, 2001, as well as concerning

the Iraq War in 2003. His most recent book is Sacred Space and Holy War (IB Tauris 2002). This volume collects some of his work on the history of the Shiite branch of Islam in modern Iraq, Iran and the Gulf. He has also written a good deal about modern Egypt, including a book, Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East: Social and Cultural Origins of Egypt's `Urabi Movement (Princeton, 1993). His concern with comparative history and Islamics is evident in his edited Comparing Muslim Societies (Michigan, 1992).

December 13, 2007: Dr. Isis Leslie, "Political Consequences of American Romanticism"

Dr Isis Leslie completed her Ph.D. in political science in 2005 at Rutgers University in New Jersey. She has taught at Georgetown University, the George Washington University and Rutgers University. Professor Leslie has been a dissertation fellow at Northeastern University, an Endowed Visiting Scholar

Dr. Isis Leslie

at the Centennial Center in Washington, D.C. and a consultant to the American Political Science Association. She is currently working on a book, The Vicissitudes of American Romanticism, a study of the nineteenth-century emergence of romantic conceptions of the self in the US. It examines the resistance African American intellectuals have historically presented to mainstream American romanticism, and the persistence and consequences of romanticism for contemporary American political culture, economic justice, welfare policy, and penal codes. Professor Leslie is an interdisciplinary scholar who draws on film studies, history, and literature to examine questions of social justice. Some of her special interests include globalization, the intersections of racial politics and political theory, comparative political thought, human rights, and the relationships between psychoanalysis and politics.

December 11, 2007: Dr. Donald Mitchell, "Pretexts, Paranoia, and Public Space: Rethinking the Right to the City After 9/11"
Don Mitchell is a Distinguished Professor of Geography and Chair of the Geography Department in the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. After receiving his PhD in Geography from Rutgers University in 1992, he taught at the University of Colorado before moving to Syracuse. He is the author of The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape

Dr. Donald Mitchell

(1996); Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction (2000); and The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space (2003) as well as numerous articles on the geography of homelessness, labor, urban public space, and contemporary theories of culture. His latest book, with Lynn Staeheli, called, The People’s Property? Power, Politics, and the Public has just been published by Routledge. He is currently working on a new NSF-funded project called: Bracero: Remaking the California Landscape, 1942-1964. Mitchell is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and has held a Fulbright Fellowship in the Institutt for Sociologi og Samfunnsgeografi at the Universitetet i Oslo. He is the founder and director of the People’s Geography Project (www.peoplesgeography.org) and a member of the Syracuse Hunger Project.

November 13, 2007: Dr. Robert Ross, "Contradictions of the Industrial Production of Culture: Nineteenth Century American Baseball and the Rise and Fall of the 1890 Players' League"

Robert Ross earned his Ph.D. from the Department of Geography at Syracuse University. He has a master’s degree in geography from University College London and a bachelor’s degree in

Dr. Robert Ross

anthropology and sociology from West Chester University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Ross’s research has concentrated on two general phenomena of contemporary and historical North American cities: the industrial production of culture and the production of public space. His most recent research focused on the relations of production within the nineteenth century professional baseball industry. Dr. Ross is currently working on converting his dissertation on this topic into book. He is also writing articles on the contradictions of industrial cultural production, labor geographies of scale, critical sports geography, and the illusion of so-called non-capitalist economic forms. He previously published work in Urban Geography, The Encyclopedia of Geography, and The Encyclopedia of North American Sports.

[Back]