2005-2006

The individuals listed below have agreed to give one lecture in the 2004-2005 academic year on behalf of MESA. Host institutions pay a $1,000 lectureship fee directly to MESA, in addition to the speaker’s travel and lodging expenses.

To Schedule A Lecturer
If you, or an institution you know, would like to arrange a lecture please contact Nadia Hlibka (nhlibka@u.arizona.edu or 520 624-5850). Please be certain to include which lecturer you would like to invite, and possible dates. In some cases scholars may be willing to speak on topics other than those listed here. The earlier the arrangements are made the better your chance of obtaining the speaker of your choice. Please do not contact lecturers directly.

Lisa Anderson is dean of the School of International and Public Affairs and professor of political science at Columbia University.  She has written and edited several books on nationalism, state formation and regime change in the Middle East and North Africa, including The State and Social Transformation in Tunisia and Libya, 1830-1980 (1986) and The Origins of Arab Nationalism (1991), and edited a book, Transitions to Democracy (1999) on regime change around the world.  Her latest book, Pursuing Truth, Exercising Power: Social Science and Public Policy in the Twenty-first Century, examines the implications of changing constituencies for social knowledge on the practice of social science research.

Sample lecture topics:

• Scholars and Citizens: The Practice and Politics of Middle East Studies
• Rewriting Maps: The Bush Administration in the Middle East
• Between Tyranny and Anarchy: The Prospects for Democracy in the Arab World
• After the Shock: Globalization, Development and the Economic Record in the Arab World Since 1973
  

Joel Beinin received his B.A. from Princeton University in 1970, his M.A. from Harvard University in 1974, and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1982.  He also studied at the American University of Cairo and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Since 1983 he has taught Middle East history at Stanford University. His research and writing focuses on workers, peasants, and minorities in the modern Middle East and on Israel, Palestine, and the Arab-Israeli conflict.  He lived in Israel in 1965-66 and 1970-73 and Egypt in 1980-81, and he returns to the region often for research. His most recent book is Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press 2001).  In 2002 he served as President of the Middle East Studies Association of North America.

Sample lecture topics:

• Palestinian-Israeli conflict
• US policy in Iraq
• Scholars, Neo-Conservative Pundits, and U.S. Middle East Policy
• Topics in the social history of Egypt (Egyptian Jews, labor history, the left, etc.)
• General survey of Egypt’s recent past

Marilyn Booth is Professor in the Program in Comparative and World Literature, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.  Her teaching and research focus on modern Arabic literature, cultural history of the Middle East, and the study of gender activisms in Arab societies and literatures.  Her research has focused on Arabic dialect literatures and on gender debates and literary texts in late 19th-early 20th century Egypt and Ottoman Syria.  She is author of Bayram al-Tunisi’s Egypt:  Social Criticism and Narrative Strategies (1990), May Her Likes Be Multiplied:  Biography and Gender Politics in Egypt (2001), and many articles and book chapters.  She also translates contemporary Arabic fiction, and has published nine volumes of translated fiction and memoirs.

Sample lecture topics:

• Famous women and gender politics:  The power of biography in early 20th-century Egypt
• Joan of Arc:  Egyptian Nationalist?
• Islamist conduct literature and legacies of western feminism
• Where’s the Home Front?:  Women’s Political Aspirations in Egypt and Visions of the Great War in Europe
• Infamous Women and Famous Wombs:  Biography, Gender, and Islamist Concepts of Community in Contemporary Egypt
• The Exemplary Woman, the Female Hero, and the Feminists of 1900: Fictional History and Histories of Activism in Egypt
• Arabic literature and translation

Laurie Brand is Professor in the School of International Relations at the University of Southern California. She received her PhD in Political Science from Columbia University. She is the author of Women, the State and Political Liberalization: Middle Eastern and North African Experiences (Columbia, 1998); Jordan's Inter-Arab Relations: The Political Economy of Alliance Making (Columbia, 1995); and Palestinians in the Arab World: Institution Building and the Search for State (Columbia, 1989). 

Sample lecture topics:

• Middle Easterners on the Move/Migration and the Middle East (In such a talk I would discuss a number of major population movements – both migrant and refugee. I would also talk about the forces behind emigration, as well as sending state and receiving state policy.)
• Possibilities for Democratization in the Middle East (This talk would consider several stalled or thwarted moves toward greater political liberalization in the early 1990s (Jordan, Morocco, Algeria). It would discuss the reasons for the failures and consider possibilities for change in the future, focusing on political and economic, rather than cultural and religious factors.)
• Women and Political Transitions (Where do women and women’s concerns fit within the domestic agenda of MENA states? What happens to such agenda when the regime faces crisis or serious challenges? How can and do MENA women respond? This talk would focus on the experiences of Jordan, Morocco and Tunisia in discussing these issues)
• Understanding the Palestinian Diaspora (This talk would explain the origins and evolution of the diaspora, the differential experiences of Palestinians across the Arab world, and hence, their differential expectations from any future peace.)

Ahmad Dallal is an Associate Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies and Chair of the Arabic Department at Georgetown University. He taught at Stanford University (2000-2003), Yale University (1994-2000), and Smith College (1990-1994). He earned his Ph.D. in Islamic Studies from Columbia University and his B.E. in Mechanical Engineering from the American University of Beirut. His academic training and research cover the history of the disciplines of learning in Muslim societies, including both the exact and the traditional sciences, as well as early modern and modern Islamic thought and movements. His books and articles are focused on the history of science, Islamic revivalist thought, and Islamic law. He is currently finishing a book-length comparative study of eighteenth-century Islamic reform entitled Islam Without Europe, Traditions of Reform in Eighteenth Century Islamic Thought. He has also written essays and delivered lectures on the background and aftermath of the September 11 attacks.

Sample lecture topics:

• Science and Religion: the Islamic Paradigm
• An Islamic Enlightenment? Traditions of Reform in Eighteenth-Century Islamic Thought

Dina Rizk Khoury is Associate Professor of History and International Affairs at George Washington University.  She received her B.A. from the American University of Beirut and her PhD in History from Georgetown University.

Sample lecture topics:

• War and Memory in Iraq
• Teaching Iraqi History
• Popular Politics in the Early Modern Middle East

Leslie Peirce received her MA in Middle East Studies from Harvard University, and a PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University. Peirce taught at Cornell for ten years, until moving to Berkeley in 1998. Her interests are Ottoman society and politics in the pre-modern period, and she generally places women at the center of her work, to see what politics and social processes look like from that vantage point. Peirce is the author of two books: The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire, Oxford University Press, 1993 (winner of the Turkish Studies Association book prize); Morality Tales: Law and Gender in the Ottoman Court of Aintab, California University Press, 2003.

Sample lecture topics:

• Power and Politics in the Ottoman Imperial Harem
• Women and Islamic Law in the Pre-modern Middle East

Donald Reid is Professor of History at Georgia State University and author of Whose Pharaohs? Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I; Cairo University and The Making of Modern Egypt; and Lawyers and Politics in the Arab World, 1880-1990.

Sample lecture topics:

• Whose Pharaohs?  Museums, Archaeology, and
  Modern Egyptian National Identity
• Egyptian-American Encounters from Muhammad
  Ali

John Voll is the director of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding and professor of Islamic history at Georgetown University. He is the author of Islam: Continuity and Change in the Modern World and co-author (with John L. Esposito) of Islam and Democracy and Makers of Contemporary Islam and is author, co-author, or editor of eight other volumes. He has taught Islamic, Middle Eastern, and world history at the University of New Hampshire and Georgetown University, and has written on movements of Islamic renewal in the modern and contemporary eras.

Sample lecture topics:

• I have given lectures recently that cover topics with titles like "Barbie Dolls and Terrorism: Old Conflicts & New Identities," "What does Bin Ladin Really Say  and What Can We Do About It?", "Big Macs & al-Qa'idah: The Franchising of Terrorism," "Beyond Crusades & Jihads."
• Transnational Islamic Networks: Contemporary and Historic
• After Political Islam: Movements and Ideologies in the Post-Islamist Era
• Muslim-Christian Relations in World History