May 15, 2007: Dr. Ira Chernus, "The US, Israel, and the Myth of National Insecurity"

Dr. Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Dr. Chernusâ??s research focuses on the discourse of peace, war, foreign policy, and nationalism in the United States, especially during the cold war and the nuclear age, and how that discourse has affected public culture and life. Professor Chernus is the recipient of many fellowships and honors such as the University of Colorado 20 ^th century Humanist Award. He is the author of numerous articles and nine books including Monsters to Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin and the forthcoming Eisenhower and Apocalypse Management: The Discourse of National (In) Security.  
 

May 8, 2007: Dr. Catherine Lutz, "Race and Militarization on the US Home Front"

Catherine A. Lutz is professor of Anthropology at the Watson institute for International Studies in Brown University. She earned her B.A in Sociology and Anthropology from Swarthmore College in 1974, and her Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from Harvard University in 1980. She has occupied several professorial rank positions in Harvard University, the State University of New York at Binghampton, and the University of North Carolina. Dr. Lutz is the recipient of many grants and honors including: a Fellowship from the Radcliff Institute for Advanced Study for 2007-2008, a research grant from the Campton Foundation in 2006, the Anthony Leeds Prize, and an honorable mention by the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing in 2002 for her book Homefront, and many more. She has written many books and articles including: Homefront: A Military City and the American 20 ^th Century (2002), and Reading National Geographic (with Jane Collins,1993), amongst others. Her latest book is entitled Local Democracy under Siege: Activism, Public Interests, and Private Politics (2007).
 

May 3, 2007: Dr. Seyed Mohammad Marandi, "Which Iran?: Memoirs of the Iranian Diaspora"

 Seyed Mohammad Marandi is an assistant professor of English Literature at the University of Tehran and head of the North American Studies department. Since 2005, he has also been an adjunct member of the Institute for North American and European Studies. Dr. Marandi received his Ph.D in 2003 from Birmingham University, writing his thesis on â?? Lord Byron, His Critics and Orientalism.â? He has most recently co-authored a book entitled â?? The British Media and Muslim Representation: The Ideology of Demonisation,â? published by the Islamic Human Rights Commission in Great Britain. He appears frequently as a commentator on Al-Jazeera International.
 

April 26, 2007: Dr. Robert Fisk, "After the Collapse: Disengagement in the Middle East"


Robert Fisk is correspondent for the British newspaper The Independent. He has over thirty years of experience in international reporting, beginning with 1970s Belfast and Portugalâ??s 1974 Carnation Revolution, and including the 1975-1990 Lebanese Civil War, the 1979 Iranian revolution, the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War, the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. Robert Fisk received a Ph.D. in Political Science from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1985. He was one of two Western journalists to stay in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war. He is the author of several books and articles including Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War (1990) and The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East (2005). Fisk is the recipient of numerous awards and honors such as the Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize (2006) and the British Press Awardsâ?? International Journalist of the Year which he won seven times. He was also awarded honorary Doctorates from the University of St. Andrews (2004), the Political and Social Science Department at Ghent University in Belgium (2006) and the American University of Beirut (2006).  
 

April 12, 2007: Dr. John Munro, "American and Arab Identities in Tension"

Dr. John Munro earned his Ph.D in English Literature from Washington University. He taught English Literature at universities in the United States and Canada and at AUB, where he also served as Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences. Later, he was appointed Professor of Mass Communication at the American University in Cairo before acting as political and media consultant to the European Commission in Cairo. He is currently part-time Visiting Professor in Human Rights and Democratisation at the University of Malta. Among his publications are A Mutual Concern, (a history of AUB) and Between Venus and Mars (a history of Cyprus).  
 

John Zogby, President and CEO of Zogby International, is one of the most respected pollsters in the United States today.

Mr. John Zoghby

â??All hail Zogby, the maverick predictor who beat us all,â?proclaimed the Washington Post in November 1996 after Zogby alone called that presidential election with pinpoint accuracy. In the razor-thin 2000 elections, daily national tracking polls conducted by Zogby International in the last few weeks foretold a tightening of the race for president while nearly all other polling firms projected an easy victory for Gov. George W. Bush. Since 1984, Zogby has polled, researched and consulted for a wide spectrum of business, media, government, and political groups including Coca Cola, Microsoft, CISCO Systems, Philip Morris, St. Judeâ??s Children Research Hospital, MCI, Reuters American, and the United States Census Bureau. John Zogby is the author of a forthcoming portrait of the new American consumer, which will be published by Random House in October of 2007.He holds degrees in history from Le Moyne College and Syracuse University. He has taught history for twenty-five years.  Zogby is also a Senior Advisor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and serves as the first-ever Senior Fellow of the Catholic University Life Cycle Institute in Washington, D.C.
 

March 6, 2007: Dr. Marcy Newman, "Promised Land Propaganda: Jewish American Education and the Zionist Lobby in the US"

Dr. Marcy Newman is visiting professor at the Center for American Studies and Research at AUB and assistant professor of English at Boise State University. Her research focuses on the relationship between culture and American policy. She is the author of Beyond Slash, Burn, and Poison:

Dr. Marcy Newman

Transforming Breast Cancer Stories into Action and editor of The Sleeper Wakes: Harlem Renaissance Stories by Women and Jessie Redmon Fauset's The Chinaberry Tree & Selected Writings. She is currently at work on her latest manuscript, tentatively entitled Disrupting Zionism: Re-educating America About Palestine.
 

March 1, 2007: Dr. Nomi Stolzenberg, "The Paradox of Tolerance: How Religious Groups Are undermined and Empowered by American-Style Liberalism and Constitutional Values"

Dr. Nomi M. Stolzenberg is Nathan and Lilly Shapell Chair in Law at the University of Southern California Law School. She is a graduate of Harvard Law School, where she served as an editor of the Harvard Law Review. Her interdisciplinary research interests include law and religion, cultural pluralism, law and liberalism, and law and literature.  Dr. Stolzenberg helped to

Dr. Nomi Stolzenberg

establish the USC Center for Law, History and Culture.  Her influential publications include â??â??He Drew a Circle that Shut Me Out': Assimilation, Indoctrination and the Paradox of a Liberal Education,â? â??The Property of Culture,â? and â??The Profanity of Law.â? She is currently at work on a book on liberalism and religion in American law and culture, which explores the paradox of religious tolerance from the angles of cultural and intellectual history, political theory and law.
 

December 5, 2006: Dr. Sirène Harb, " Writing and Identity in Suheir Hammad's Born Palestinian, Born Black"


Dr. Sirène Harb is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative literature at the American University of Beirut. She received her MA from AUB in 1996 and her PhD from Purdue University in 2002. Dr. Harb was a visiting scholar at ColumbiaUniversity's Center for Comparative Literature and Society in the summers of 2004 and 2005 and in the spring of 2006. She is the author of several articles on American and Francophone literatures and postcolonial/gender studies.

Dr. Sirène Harb

Her work appeared in Romance Languages Annual and Discursive Geographies, and her annotated translation of the GIP pamphlet on George Jackson (by Michel foucault et al.) is forthcoming in Warfare: Prison and the American Homeland from Duke University Press.   
 

November 28, 2006: Dr. Muhammad Ali Khalidi, "'The Arab Street': Tracking a Political Metaphor" 

  Dr. Muhammad Ali Khalidi is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the American University of Beirut. He earned his MA and Ph.D in Philosophy from Columbia University in 1987 and 1991 respectively. Professor Khalidi is the editor and translator of Medieval Islamic Philosophical Writings

Dr. Muhammad Ali Khalidi

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) and the author of several articles on the philosophy of science and the philosophy of mind and language. Dr. Khalidi is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, the most recent of which is the Teaching Excellence Award at AUB (2005).
 

Dr. Paul Jahshan

(2001),and of Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth (forthcoming, January 2007). He has also published numerous articles on such topics as cyberculture and the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe. Dr. Jahshan presented a paper on Poe in the Transatlanticism conference in July 2006 in Oxford.   Paul Jahshan is also the founder of critical theory reading groups at NDU in 2000, and has recently been appointed Special Lecturer at the School of American and Canadian Studies at Nottingham University.
 

Dr. Victoria Fontan

and Development Studies at the University of Limerick in Ireland. Her research focuses on the development of terrorism and political violence in post-conflict areas, more specifically on humiliation and social polarization. She is the editor of Education and Training in Modern Peace Operations (2004), as well as numerous articles such as â??David vs. Goliath: The Lebanese Hezbollah in the Current World Order â? and â??Polarization between Occupier and Occupied in Post-Saddam Iraq: Humiliation and the Formation of Political Violence."
 

Dr. Hilton Obenzinger is the Associate Director for Honors Writing and Undergraduate Research Programs, and Lecturer in the Department of English at Stanford University.  He earned

Dr. Hilton Obenzinger

his Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University in 1997. Dr. Obenzinger is the author of eight books of fiction, poetry, history and criticism, including This Passover Or The Next I Will Never Be in Jersualem (1980), New York on Fire (1989), Cannibal Eliot and the Lost Histories of San Francisco (1993), American Palestine: Melville, Twain and the Holy Land Mania (1999), and  A*Hole (2004) .  Hilton Obenzinger has also taught on the Yurok Indian Reservation, operated a community printing press in San Francisco's Mission District, and co-edited a publication devoted to Middle East peace.
 

Dr. Matthew Smith