Lectures, Workshops, and Performances
For information regarding any event, click here
Fall 2008
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08/25/2008
Ken Stein |
Dr. Kenneth W. Stein is the William E. Schatten Professor of
Contemporary Middle Eastern History, Political Science and Israeli
Studies at Emory University, Atlanta Georgia. He founded and
developed the International Studies Center, was the first director
of the Carter Center (1983-1986), and established the Institute for
the Study of Modern Israel (ISMI). Professor Stein is the author of
numerous books and publications. Among them are Hebrew and English
editions of Heroic Diplomacy: Sadat, Kissinger, Carter, Begin
and the Quest for Arab-Israeli Peace Routledge:1999); Making Peace Among Arabs and Israelis: Lessons from Fifty Years of
Negotiating Experience, United States Institute for
Peace:1991), and The Land Question in Palestine, 1917-1939,
(North Carolina Press: 1984, 1985, and 2003). Dr. Stein received his
undergraduate BA degree from Franklin and Marshall College and two
Masters and his doctoral degree from The University of Michigan. He
studied for two years at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
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09/08/2008
Linda Gradstein |
Linda
Gradstein has been the Israel correspondent for NPR since 1990. She
is a member of the team that received the Overseas Press Club award
for her coverage of the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister
Yitzhak Rabin and the team that received Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia
University Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism for her
coverage of the Gulf War. Linda spent 1998-9 as a Knight Journalist
Fellow at Stanford University. Gradstein has covered important
events in Israel and the West Bank and Gaza Strip including the
intifada, the mass immigration of Soviet immigrants to Israel, the
return of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to Gaza, the rise of
Hamas, the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the Gulf war, and two
elections in Israel. Linda earned a bachelor's degree in Foreign
Service from Georgetown University in 1985 and a master's degree in
Arab Studies. She spent a year as a Rotary Fellow at the American
University in Cairo.
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10/01/2008
Jack Renard |
Jack Renard is a Professor of Islamic Studies in the
Department of Theological Studies at Saint Louis University. He has
a PhD in Islamic Studies from Harvard University and is the author
of numerous books including Knowledge of God in Classical Sufism: Foundations of Islamic Mystical Theology (2002) Islam and the Heroic Image: Themes in Literature and The Visual Arts (1999). His most recent work, Friends of God: Islamic Images of Piety,Commitment,
and Servanthood is published by the University of California Press (2008).
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10/06/2008
Ahmed Rashid |
Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani journalist
was the Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia correspondent for the
‘Far Eastern Economic Review,’ for 22 years. His latest book Jihad, The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia was published
in February 2002 by Yale University Press and has been translated
into 15 languages. In 2003, it was published in paperback by Penguin
Books and has also become a course book for universities throughout
the US, Europe and Japan.
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10/20/2008
Taxi to the Darkside |
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2008 Academy Award Winner – Best
Documentary
An
in-depth look at the torture practices of the United States in
Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, focusing on Dilawar, a 22 year
old innocent taxi driver in Afghanistan who was tortured and killed
in 2002.
After
Film: Q & A with writer/director Alex Gibney
Alex Gibney is
an Oscar, Emmy and DuPont Columbia award winning
American film director and producer. His works
as director include Enron: The Smartest Guys in the
Room (2005) (nominated for an Academy Award), The
Trials of Henry Kissinger (2002), The Human Behavior
Experiments (2006), Jimi Hendrix and the Blues, and
Taxi to the Dark Side (2007), focusing on an
innocent taxi driver in Afghanistan who was tortured and killed at
Bagram Air Force Base in 2002 (winner of the Academy
Award for Documentary Feature). Several films
he directed and/or produced have been screened at
the Cannes, Sundance, and Tribeca Film
Festivals. Gibney is the President of Jigsaw
Productions, a production company which produces
independent films, music documentaries, and TV
mini-series. This year he won the Yale Film Studies'
Program Award for his contributions to film culture.
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11/07/2008
Iain Shearer |
Iain
Shearer is an archaeologist and research affiliate at the Centre for
Applied Archaeology based at University College London. He has
excavated in Afghanistan and Iran, including at Nishapur and is also
employed as a freelance researcher for Lonely Planet guidebooks.
Spring 2009
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1/12/2009
H.G. (Hugo Gajus) Scheltema |
Ambassador Gajus Scheltema is currently the Consul General of the Netherlands in New York. He
previously has served as the Dutch Ambassador to Jordan and a
political adviser to ISAF Regional Command South in Kandahar,
Afghanistan.
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2/23/2008
McGuire Gibson |
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Donny George |
McGuire Gibson is professor of Mesopotamian Archaeology at the Oriental Institute and the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. He is one of the world's leading authorities on ancient Mesopotamia. He has done fieldwork in Iraq and elsewhere in the region and has published extensively. He was as part of a National Geographic delegation visiting Iraq to inspect archaeological sites in 2003. He also has provided expert advice to UNESCO and other cultural and scholarly organizations working to preserve the archaeological heritage of Iraq. His fieldwork has taken him to Nippur, the religious center of ancient Mesopotamia. Additionally, he has done fieldwork in Yemen, Saudi Arabia and northeastern Syria. In 1992, he and colleague Augusta McMahon published Lost Heritage: Antiquities Stolen from Iraq's Regional Museums, the first academic publication to call attention to the problem of looting after the first Gulf War. He also is the author and co-author of numerous articles and books on ancient Mesopotamia.
Donny George was the Director General of the National Museum in Baghdad, for
which he is internationally known for recovering almost half of the
15,000 Mesopotamian artworks and artifacts that date back to as much
as 6,000 years, which were looted from the museum and Iraq's 12,500
archaeological sites during the American-led invasion of his country
in 2003. He was also the Chairman of the State Board of Antiquities
and Heritage (SBAH), and the president of the Iraq State Board of
Antiquities and Heritage. He has authored two books on the
architecture and stone industries of Tell Es-Sawaan, and has given
presentations on the current archeological and museum conditions in
Iraq at conferences in numerous countries.
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3/23/2008
Reuven Firestone |
Rabbi Firestone is Professor of Medieval Jewish and Islamic Studies, HUC-JIR/Los Angeles. He served for eight years as Director of HUC-JIR's Edgar F. Magnin School of Graduate Studies and the Jerome Louchheim School of Undergraduate Jewish Studies at the University of Southern California, which offers degrees in cooperation with HUC-JIR. Prior to joining the HUC-JIR faculty, he taught at Boston University and was Yad Hanadiv Research Fellow at the Hebrew University. He received a Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA) III research fellowship for the Spring 2006 semester for study at the American University of Cairo, funded by the Fulbright Binational Committee in Egypt and the U.S. Department of Education. In 2000, Professor Firestone was awarded a fellowship for independent research from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and was chosen to be a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Jewish Studies at the University of Pennsylvania in 2002. His specialties are early Islam and its relationship with Jews and Judaism, scriptural interpretation of the Bible and Qur'an, and the phenomenon of holy war.
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4/20/2008
Combatants for Peace |
Combatants for Peace – Lecture given jointly by an
Israeli and a Palestinian veteran, in which both sides tell about
the violent actions that they have taken part in and about the
turning point which led them to understand the limits of violence.
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