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.   
 

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."
 

Professor Jack Shaheen is an internationally acclaimed author and media critic. An Oxford Research Scholar and former CBS news consultant on Middle East Affairs, Shaheenâ??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 Pennsylvaniaâ??s Janet Lee Stevens Award; the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committeeâ??s Lifetime Achievement, and the Pancho Be Award for â??the advancement of humanity.â?
 

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).

Ali Abunimah

Video of Lecture

Omar Blaik is chief executive and president of U3 Ventures, a real estate development and advisory company in

Omar Blaik

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.
 

Dr. Hisham Ahmed

and â??Suicide Bombingâ??: Causes and Consequences,â? (in Tore Bjorgo, ed. Root Causes of Terrorism: Myths, Reality and Ways Forward) and â??The Evolution of Hamas in Palestinian Society: Domestic, Regional and International Determinants,â? (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.
 

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, Nietzscheâ??s On the Genealogy of Morality (Cambridge University Press), he is the author of five books, including his most recent, Nietzscheâ??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.
 

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."
 

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. 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).  
 

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.
 

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

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

Dr. Robert Ross

degree in anthropology and sociology from West Chester University of Pennsylvania.  Dr. Rossâ??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.