Muslims in a Global Context: The Arab Spring
Friday, March 30 - Sunday, April 1, 2012
| Course Home | Schedule | Speakers & Abstracts | Registration | Contact Us |
Speakers
Muhsin al-Musawi
Muhsin al-Musawi is a literary critic and a scholar of classical and modern Arabic literature and comparative cultural studies. He taught for over two decades at universities in the Arab world before moving to Columbia University. He is the author of twenty-eight books (including four novels) and over sixty scholarly articles. He has been the editor of the Journal of Arabic Literature since 2000. Professor al-Musawi's teaching and research interests span several periods and genres. His books include: Scheherazade in England (1981); The Society of One Thousand and One Nights (2000); Anglo-Orient: Easterners in Textual Camps (2000); The Postcolonial Arabic Novel: Debating Ambivalence (2003); Arabic Poetry: Trajectories of Modernity and Tradition (2006); Reading Iraq: Culture and Power in Conflict (2006); The Islamic Context of the Thousand and One Nights (Columbia University Press, 2009); and Islam in the Street: The Dynamics of Arabic Literary Production (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009). He is also the editor of and a contributor to Arabic Literary Thresholds: Sites of Rhetorical Turn in Contemporary Scholarship (2009), and wrote the introduction and notes to the Barnes & Noble edition of The Thousand and One Nights, published in 2007. Professor al-Musawi was the recipient of the Owais Award in Literary Criticism in 2002.
Amani Attia
Amani Attia, a native of Egypt, is an Arabic lecturer and Coordinator of the Arabic program in the Less Commonly Taught Languages center of the University of Pittsburgh. Prior to her move to Pittsburgh she worked as an Assistant Professor of English Literature in Alexandria University, Egypt, and in Beirut Arab University, Lebanon. Amani currently teaches Introduction to Arab Literature and Culture both at the University of Pittsburgh and at Carnegie Mellon University.
Riham Bahi
Dr. Riham Bahi is currently an Assistant Professor at Cairo University in the Faculty of Economics and Political Science and a visiting Assistant Professor at the American University of Cairo. Dr. Bahi received her PhD in International and Public Affairs from Northeastern University in Boston. Dr. Bahi also serves as the Dialogue Coordinator at the Center for Civilization Studies and the Dialogue of Cultures. Her particular research interests include Islamic Feminism, the global and transnational aspects of political Islam and U.S. relations with the Muslim world.
Mohammed Bamyeh
Mohammed Bamyeh is a professor of sociology at the University of Pittsburgh and the editor of the International Sociology Review of Books (ISRB). He has held the Hubert Humphrey chair in International Studies at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and the SSRC-MacArthur Fellowship in International Peace and Security. He has previously taught at Georgetown University, New York University, SUNY-Buffalo, and the University of Massachusetts. He has delivered invited lectures at many other universities and institutions in the United States, Canada, China, Taiwan, Sweden, Jordan, Turkey, Egypt, Italy, Malaysia, Macau, and Zimbabwe. Mohammed Bamyeh received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1990.
His subsequent areas of interest have included Islamic studies, political and cultural globalization, civil society and social movements, and comparative social and political theory. He is currently involved in studying the Arab revolutions, about which he lectured widely and published several articles since January 2011. His most recent book, Islam and Society: Social Movements, Global Structures, Social Critique, is expected to appear as part of the American Sociological Association's Rose monograph series, co-sponsored by the Russell Sage Foundation in 2012. Bamyeh is the founding editor of the journal Passages: Journal of Transnational and Transcultural Studies, the former book series editor of "World Heritage Studies on Multiculturalism and Transnationalism," and the current co-editor of the book series "Tracking Globalization" (Indiana UP). He has further organized a number of community-oriented film series on the Arab World, and participated in organizing two larger scale Arab film festivals in Minneapolis.
Richard Bulliet
Richard W. Builliet is Professor of Middle Eastern History at Columbia University where he also directed the Middle East Institute of the School of International and Public Affairs for twelve years. Born in Rockford, Illinois, in 1940, he came to Columbia in 1976 after undergraduate and graduate work at Harvard and eight years as a faculty member at Harvard and Berkeley. He is a specialist on Iran, the social history of the Islamic Middle East, and the 20th century resurgence of Islam.
His most recent scholarly work is Cotton, Climate, and Camels in Early Islamic Iran: A Moment in World History (2009). His earlier books include Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers (2005), The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization (2004), Islam: The View from the Edge (1994), Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period (1979), The Camel and the Wheel (1975), and The Patricians of Nishapur (1972). He has also written five novels, beginning with Kicked to Death by a Camel (1973) and ending with The One-Donkey Solution (2011), and is co-author of a world history textbook The Earth and Its Peoples (5ed. 2009).
Loubna ElAbbadi
Loubna ElAbbadi, a native of Morocco, is a PhD candidate in Rhetoric and Communication Studies at Duquesne University. Her PhD research centers around the rhetorical implications of the post 9/11 U.S. public diplomacy campaigns in the Arab Middle East, with a particular focus on Media Diplomacy.
Professor ElAbbadi is adjunct faculty in both Departments of Communication and Linguistics at the University of Pittsburgh, as well as the department of Modern Languages of Carnegie Mellon University, where she teaches courses in communication studies, and Arabic Language and Culture. In 2009, professor ElAbbadi developed a course on the Cultures and Identities of the Arab Middle East which she continues to teach at the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Linguistics.
Fatma El-Hamidi
Fatma El-Hamidi, Ph.D. is a labor economist, received her graduate studies from The University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1996. Fatma El-Hamidi teaches courses at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GSPIA), and the Department of Economics, at the University Of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Fatma El-Hamidi's research emphasize gender aspects of the labor markets and policies of developing countries- highlighting the Middle East- the effects of structural adjustment policies and the impact of local and global policies on labor markets, trade liberalization, and labor remunerations. Her current research projects include skill mismatch in the labor market, poverty levels and income distribution, female labor supply, as well as minimum wages and their effects on other wages and employment levels. Her research has been published in academic journals. She is a member of several economic associations in and out of the United States.
Heba Raouf Ezzat
Heba Raouf Ezzat is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science of the Faculty of Economics and Political Science of Cairo University. She is also a visiting faculty member at the American University in Cairo. She earned her BA (Honors), MA (Honors) and PhD in Political Science, all from Cairo University. She has also spent time as a visiting researcher at the Centre for Democracy of the University of Westminster in London and at Oxford's Centre for Islamic Studies. In addition to her teaching at Cairo University, Dr. Heba also is Coordinator of the Civil Society Program for Research and Training and Foreign Relations Coordinator of the University's Center for Political Research and Studies and Foreign Relations and Academic Events Coordinator of the Program for Dialogue between Civilizations in the University's Faculty of Economics and Political Science. Dr. Heba is widely published in both English and Arabic on subjects related to Islam, women and politics, and she authored a background paper on Gender Equality in the Arab World for the 2006 UN Development Programme's Arab Human Development Report. She has lectured in the US (Council on Foreign Relations, Georgetown University and University of California at Berkeley), Canada (McGill University), the UK (St. Anthony's College of Oxford University, the Foreign Office and Lambeth Palace in London), Kuwait (Higher Committee for Sharia), and Morocco (Ministry of Awqaf). She also lectures regularly on social theory to imams and Islamic scholars at the Dar ul-Ifta in Cairo. Dr. Heba was selected for membership in the Young Global Leaders of the World Initiative of the World Economic Forum in 2005 and from 2003 to 2006 was a member of the Council of the 100 for Western-Islamic Understanding and the Religious Leaders Forum of the World Economic Forum. Since 1999, she has been co-founder, and consultant on strategic planning and editorial policy evaluation for www.islamonline.net. She is the program convener for the Building Global Democracy program in the Middle East region. BGD is a major international action-oriented research initiative that explores how globalization can be governed in democratic ways (www.buildingglobaldemocracy.org). Dr. Heba is currently interested in topics such as trans-local and cyber Islam; the changing maps of citizenship; women, empowerment and social change; globalization, violence and civility; and human agency, space and time.
Moataz Herzawi Fattah
Dr. Moataz Herzawi Fattah is a political advisor to both the former Prime Minister and the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF) and a political commentator on Egyptian TV. He currently has appointments with Cairo University, Central Michigan University and the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington D.C. He was the 2010-2011 UCIS Visiting Professor in Contemporary International Issues at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Fattah’s work focuses on the intersection of Islam and democracy and the political culture of Muslim countries. He has forty academic publications in both Arabic and English about the political, economic and cultural aspects of the Middle East and US foreign policy toward the region. His most recent work titled Democratic Values in Muslims Societies is an investigation of Muslim beliefs about democracy across 34 diverse Islamic societies. He received his PhD in Political Science from Western Michigan University
Valentine M. Moghadam
Valentine Moghadam joined Northeastern University in Boston as Director of the International Affairs Program, and Professor of Sociology, in January 2011. She was previously at Purdue University. Born in Tehran, Iran, Dr. Moghadam received her higher education in Canada and the U.S. In addition to her academic career, she has been a senior research fellow at UNU/WIDER in Helsinki, Finland, and a section chief at UNESCO in Paris. Dr. Moghadam’s areas of research are globalization, transnational feminist networks, civil society and citizenship, and gender in the Middle East and North Africa. Among her many publications are Modernizing Women: Gender and Social Change in the Middle East (1993, 2003, third edition expected in 2013), Globalizing Women: Transnational Feminist Networks (2005), and Globalization and Social Movements: Islamism, Feminism, and the Global Justice Movement (2009, second edition expected in 2012).
Zakia Salime
Zakia Salime is an Assistant Professor in Sociology and Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University. Her research interests include race, empire, the political economy of the “war on terror,” developmental policies, Islamic societies and movements, and Middle East and US relations. Professor Salime has a book manuscript forthcoming that explores the interactions among the feminist and the Islamist women’s movements in Morocco. Her current research explores the connections between gender, the war on terror, and neoliberal reforms in the Middle East.
M. Najeeb Shafiq
M. Najeeb Shafiq is an Assistant Professor of Economics and Education at the Department of Administrative and Policy Studies, and Department of Economics (secondary appointment). He uses large data and advanced quantitative methods to explore educational topics in developing countries and the U.S. Dr. Shafiq has served as a consultant for the World Bank, Millennium Challenge Corporation, and organizations in Bangladesh, Morocco,Pakistan, and the U.S. He received his PhD in Economics and Education from Columbia University, and previously held faculty appointment at Indiana University at Bloomington.
Samer Shehata
Samer Shehata teaches courses on comparative and Middle East politics and political economy, US policy toward the Middle East, Islamist Politics, Egyptian politics and society, culture and politics in the Arab world, and other subjects. During the 2002-03 academic year, Dr. Shehata served as Acting Director of the Master of Arts in Arab Studies Program. Before coming to Georgetown he spent one year as a Fellow at the Society of Fellows at Columbia University and another as Director of Graduate Studies at New York University's Center for Near Eastern Studies. He has also taught at the American University in Cairo. Shehata's research interests include Middle East politics, U.S. foreign policy, Islamist politics, elections under authoritarianism, labor, social class and inequality; "development"; ethnography and the Hajj. His writings have appeared in both academic and policy journals including "The International Journal of Middle East Studies," "Current History," "Middle East Policy," "The Georgetown Journal of International Affairs," MERIP, Arab Reform Bulletin, Slate, Salon, Al Hayat, Al Ahram Weekly and other publications. His PhD dissertation received the Malcolm Kerr Dissertation Award in the social sciences from the Middle East Studies Association of North America and he is the author of "Shop Floor Culture and Politics in Egypt" (SUNY Press: 2009). After September 11, 2001 (in the spring of 2002), he developed a popular course (co-taught with Michael Hudson) on "The US, the Middle East, and the War on Terrorism", which he continues to teach. Shehata has received numerous fellowships including from the National Endowment for the Humanities/American Research Center in Egypt, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Carnegie Foundation. His web site is https://digitalcommons.georgetown.edu/blogs/samershehata/
Dan Simpson
Dan Simpson retired from the U.S. Foreign Service after 35 years of assignments to countries in Africa, the Middle East and Europe, including as U.S. ambassador to the Central African Republic, ambassador and special envoy to Somalia, and ambasssador to the Democratic Republic of Congo. He has been associate editor and member of the editorial board of the Post-Gazette and The Toledo Blade since 2001.
Sponsored by:
University of Pittsburgh: Global Studies Center and the Sociology Department
Carnegie Mellon University: H. John Heinz III College, Office of the Provost, and Division of Student Affairs
Consortium for Educational Resources on Islamic Studies