12 May 2010: Dr. Derek Gregory, "Baghdad Burning? Urban Violence and New Wars" [CASAR sponsored this lecture as part of the City Debates Conference organized by the Architecture Department at AUB]

6 May 2010: Dr. Salim Washington, "Twentieth Century Aesthetic Revolt: The REvolutionary Implications of Jazz" 

31 March 2010: Dr. Alex Lubin, "Fear of an Arab Planet:" The Sonic Geographies of Afro-Arab Internationalism 

Robert F.  Reid-Pharr is Professor of English and American Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.  The author of many works on race, gender, and sexuality in American culture, Reid-Pharr's latest book is Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual (New York University Press, 2007).  He lives in Brooklyn. 

Nathan J. Citino is an associate professor of history at Colorado State University.  His book, From Arab Nationalism to OPEC:  Eisenhower, King Sa‘ud, and the Making of U.S.-Saudi Relations, was just published in a second edition by Indiana University Press.  His other scholarship has appeared in Diplomatic History, Diplomacy & Statecraft, the Arab Studies Journal, and the International Journal of Middle East Studies.

16 March 2010: Dr. Lizabeth Cohen, "Saving America's Cities in the Postwar Suburban Age"

Lizabeth Cohen is Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies and Chair of the Department of History at Harvard University.  She also teaches in the graduate program in the History of American Civilization at Harvard.  She received her A.B. from Princeton University, and her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.  She taught at Carnegie Mellon University and New York University before coming to Harvard in 1997.  In her historical research and writing on twentieth-century America, Cohen aspires to bring together social, political, and cultural history. Her first book, Making a New Deal:  Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1929 (Cambridge, 1990, pbk 1992; second edition, 2008), won the Bancroft Prize in American History, the Philip Taft Labor History Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.  She is also the co-author with David Kennedy of an American history college textbook, The American Pageant (Houghton Mifflin, 1998, 2002, 2006, 2010).  Most recently, she has published A Consumers’ Republic:  The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (Knopf, 2003; Vintage 2004), which has been widely reviewed and acclaimed.  She is currently at work on a book entitled Saving America’s Cities:  Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age, under contract with Farrar, Straus.  Cohen is the recipient of several fellowships such as the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the  National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies, and the Taubman Center for State and Local Government, the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston, and the Real Estate Academic Initiative—all of Harvard University.

9-10 March 2010: The Second Annual Meeting of Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Centers

CASAR sponsored two public events as part of the Second Annual Meeting of Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Centers: 

• "Perspectives on Islamic Studies and American Studies" A forum featuring representatives of the Alwaleed Centers, faculty and graduate students from AUB, and scholars from other lebanese universities.
• "Building Bridges for Better Understanding Between the Arab/Muslim Worlds and the West" by the directors of the six Alwaleed Centers: Hugh Goddard (Edinburgh University), Jerry Wayne Leach (American University in Cairo), John Esposito (Georgetown University), Robert Myers (American University of Beirut), Roy Parviz Mottahedeh (Harvard University) and Yasir Suleiman (Cambridge University).

3 March 2010: Ms. Natasha Thandiwe Vally, "Historical and Contemporary Responses to South African and Israeli Apartheid"

CASAR sponsored this event as part of the First Israeli Apartheid Week at AUB organized by a group of AUB graduate students. A film screening of "Amandla! A Revolution in Four Part Harmony,"  a documentary depicting the struggles of black South Africans against the injustices of Apartheid preceeded this lecture. The lecture was also followed by a discussion moderated by Dr. Noel Ignatiev, Edward Said Chair of American Studies, CASAR.

2 March 2010: Dr. ElAbbas Benmamoun, "Language Maintenance and Loss: Arabic in the USA Among Second Generation Arab Americans"

Abbas Benmamoun is Professor and Head of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Illinois. He received his BA from Mohammed V University in Rabat Morocco, his MA from University College London, and his Ph.D. from the University of Southern California. His research focuses on comparative syntax and morphology and on Arabic as a heritage language. He has also collaborated with colleagues on projects on language acquisition, comparative syntax, and computational linguistics. He is the author of The Feature Structure of Functional Categories (Oxford University Press, 2000) and is co-author of the 2010 book The Syntax of Arabic with Joseph Aoun and Lina Choueiri. Benmamoun has published several articles in academic journals such as Linguistic Inquiry and Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. He is also the recipient of grants and awards from Fulbright and the National Science Foundation.

25 February 2010: Dr. Noel Ignatiev, "Revolution, Democracy, Universality: the World View of C.L.R. James"

Noel Ignatiev is Edward Said Chair of American Studies at the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud Center for American Studies and Research (CASAR). He receivd his PhD from Harvard in the History of American Civilization. He is author of How the Irish Became White (recently reissued as a Routledge Classic), coeditor of Race Traitor (winner of the 1996 American Book Award), editor of Lesson of the Hour: Wendell Phillips on Abolition and Strategy, and author of numerous articles. He has been a fellow at the W.E.B Du Bois Institute at Harvard University and a Regents Fellow at the University of California-Riverside. When not at AUB, he teaches in the Liberal Arts Department at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. His next publication, A New Notion: Two Articles by C.L.R. James, is scheduled for December from PM Press.  

24 February 2010: Ambassador Raana Rahim, "Pakistan's Current Challenges and Opportunities in the Dynamics of the Region "
(This lecture was co-sponsored with The Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs (IFI))

H.E. Raana Rahim is the current Ambassador of Pakistan to Lebanon with a distinguished career in diplomacy dating back to 1985 when she served as First Secretary to the Embassy of Pakistan in Paris, as well as Deputy Permanent Representative to UNESCO. In 1987, Rahim became Director of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), holding this post for 12 years. She then served as Minister (Economic) Consulate General of Pakistan in Dubai, and in 2001 was posted as Consul General of Pakistan in Los Angeles. In 2003, she served as ambassador in Turkmenistan for nearly two and a half years before taking up Deputation with the National Defence Ministry. She is published in the journals of the National Defence University (NDU) Washington and the Monterey Post Graduate Naval School.

13 January 2010: Dr. Michael Sorkin, "Eutopia Now"
(This lecture was co-sponsored with The Department of Architecture and Design at AUB)

Michael Sorkin is the principal of the Michael Sorkin Studio in New York City, and he is also Distinguished Professor of Architecture and the Director of the Graduate Urban Design Program at the City College of New York. His work is dedicated to urbanism as both an artistic practice and a medium for social amelioration.

6-9 January 2010: CASAR Third International Conference, "Connections and Ruptures: America and the Middle East"

Over 80 American Studies Scholars from 15 countries came to AUB to discuss topics related to "Connections and Ruptures: America and the Middle East." The conference took place at AUB campus and played a role in hosting a diverse group of scholars.

17 December 2009: Dr. Duriel Harris, "Sounding the Critical Black Body: Towards a Poetics of Performance"
(This lecture was co-sponsored with The Department of English and the Creative Writing Program)

Heralded by WBEZ Chicago Public Radio as one of three poets for the 21^st century, Duriel E. Harris is the author of the sound recording PRDGM and two books of poetry: Drag (Elixir Press, 2003) and Amnesiac: Poems (Sheep Meadow Press, forthcoming). An acclaimed poet, performance/sound artist and scholar, Harris holds degrees from Yale University and the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois. She has been awarded grants from the Illinois Arts Council and post-doctoral residencies at the University of Illinois Chicago and the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is currently at work on AMNESIAC, a media art project funded in part by the UCSB Center for Black Studies, Race and Technology Initiative. Sterling Plumpp describes her work as “a twenty-first century literary text emerging out of the prism of race, gender, and social class. It is eloquently postmodern funk and intimately original." In addition to performing her work in cities across the US, Harris is also an assistant professor of English and teaches creative writing and poetics at Illinois State University.  

15 December 2009: Dr. Nicholas De Genova, "The Deportation Regime"

Professor Nicholas De Genova holds the Swiss Chair in Mobility Studies as a visiting professor during the fall of 2009 at the University of Bern. He has previously been an Assistant Professor of anthropology at Columbia and Stanford Universities (in the United States), and also an international research fellow at the University of Warwick (in England).  He is the author of Working the Boundaries: Race, Space, and "Illegality" in Mexican Chicago (2005), co-author of Latino Crossings: Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and the Politics of Race and Citizenship (2003), editor of Racial Transformations: Latinos and Asians Remaking the United States (2006), and co-editor of The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement (2010; Duke University Press).  He is completing two new books, a scholarly study titled The Spectacle of Terror: Immigration, Race, and the Homeland Security State, and a memoir, Crossing the Line: A Memoir of Free Speech during Wartime.

26 November 2009: Dr. Donald Sharpes, "The History of the U.S. Constitutional Principles: Civil Law Vs. Religious Imperatives"

Dr. Donald K. Sharpes is Professor in the Emeritus College at Arizona State University, and was a former director in the U.S. Department of Education in Washington DC. He has taught at the universities of Maryland, Maine, Virginia, Virginia Tech, Utah State, Weber State and Arizona State. He was a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Qinghai Normal University from 1988-94, and was the first American inducted as a Fellow in the China Senior Professors Association. In 2008 he was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the International Studies group of the American Educational Research Association. He has authored 18 books and over 240 articles in the social and behavioral sciences, humanities, and teacher education. He has been published in the U.S., England, Finland, Norway, Germany (in German), India, Malaysia, China (in Chinese), Hong Kong, and Denmark (in Danish), and has lived and worked in the Middle East.

19 November 2009: Dr. Naif Al Mutawa, "From Mecca to Metropolis: The Creation of THE 99"

Dr. Naif Al-Mutawa is the creator of THE 99-the first group of superheroes born of an Islamic archetype. Recently, Forbes named THE 99 as one of the top 20 trends sweeping the globe. Dr. Al-Mutawa holds a PhD in Clinical Psychology from Long Island University, a Masters in Clinical Psychology from Long Island University, a Masters in Business Administration from Columbia University and a Masters in Organizational Psychology from Teacher’s College, Columbia University. In addition to his literary work, Dr. Al-Mutawa has had extensive clinical experience working with former prisoners of war in Kuwait, as well as at the Survivors of Political Torture unit of Bellevue Hospital in New York.

20 October 2009: Dr. Raff Ellis, "Lebanese Emigration 1881-1914: How and Why the First Wave Emigration Occurred"

Raff Ellis is a prolific Lebanese-American writer of short stories and political commentary. His first full-length book, a memoir entitled Kisses from a Distance, is based in part on over 200 letters, spanning some 65 years, that his mother had saved from family and friends in Lebanon. It was published by Cune Press, Seattle, Washington, and it received an award for excellence from the Arab-American National Museum in the Adult Non-Fiction category. Mr. Ellis received a BS from LeMoyne College in Pure Science and an MBA from the University of Central Florida, and he is a former computer industry executive with a broad range of experience, including a lengthy stint in academia. He spent his entire business career in computer-related activities, rising from the position of computer programmer to become the CEO of an Information R& D firm.