The Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud Center for American Studies and Research will be sponsoring the following lectures and events during the Spring Semester 2012:

U.S. Media Regimes, Democracy and the New Information Environment
Lecturer: Dr. Michael Delli Carpini
Affiliation: Annenberg School for Communication 
Date: 6 March 2012
Time: 6pm
Place: West Hall, Auditorium A

Michael X. Delli Carpini, Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication, received his B.A. and M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania (1975) and his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota (1980).  Prior to joining the University of Pennsylvania faculty in July of 2003, Professor Delli Carpini was Director of the Public Policy program of the Pew Charitable Trusts (1999-2003), and member of the Political Science Department at Barnard College and graduate faculty of Columbia University (1987-2002), serving as chair of the Barnard department from 1995 to 1999. Delli Carpini began his academic career as an Assistant Professor in the Political Science Department at Rutgers University (1980-1987).  His research explores the role of the citizen in American politics, with particular emphasis on the impact of the mass media on public opinion, political knowledge and political participation. He is author of Stability and Change in American Politics: The Coming of Age of the Generation of the 1960s (New York University Press, 1986), What Americans Know about Politics and Why It Matters (Yale University Press, 1996 and winner of the 2008 American Association of Public Opinion Researchers Book Award), A New Engagement? Political Participation, Civic Life and the Changing American Citizen (Oxford University Press, 2006), Talking Together: Public Deliberation and Political Participation in America (University of Chicago Press, 2009), and After Broadcast News: Media Regimes, Democracy, and the New Information Environment (Cambridge University Press, 2011), as well as numerous articles, essays and edited volumes on political communications, public opinion and political socialization.   Dean Delli Carpini was awarded the 2008 Murray Edelman Distinguished Career Award from the Political Communication Division of the American Political Science Association.

Homonationalism Gone Viral: Discipline, Control, and the Affective Politics of Sensation
Lecturer: Dr. Jasbir Puar
Affiliation: Rutgers University
Date: 13 March 2012
Time: 6pm
Place: West Hall, Auditorium A

Abstract: Homonationalism as a concept and an organizing platform has emerged in relevance to numerous debates about sexual rights in various locations in North America, Europe, India, and the Israel-Palestine conflict. While homonationalism itself may well become reified as another identity formation, in this paper I connect the original intentions behind its theorization and trace its paths of transmission through various forms of technological innovation. With a focus on the discourse of “pinkwashing” and the work of Palestinian Queers for BDS, I argue that these paths belie and undermine any stable identity formation and rearticulate homonationalism not as an accusation, a problematic subject positioning, or something to oppose, but rather an assemblage of affect, bodily forces, and discourses. In the case of the Israel-Palestine conflict, homonationalism is a facet of modernity that is embedded in the spatial logics of discipline and control that articulate an emergent form of neoliberal governmentality.  

Professor Puar is Associate Professor of Women's & Gender Studies at Rutgers University.  Her research interests include gender, sexuality, globalization; postcolonial and diaspora studies; South Asian cultural studies; and theories of assemblage and affect. She is the author of Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Duke University Press 2007), which won the 2007 Cultural Studies Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies. Professor Puar has also authored numerous articles that appear in Gender, Place, and Culture, Social Text, Radical History Review, Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and Feminist Legal Studies. Her edited volumes include a special issue of GLQ titled, "Queer Tourism: Geographies of Globalization" and co-edited a volume of Society and Space titled "Sexuality and Space". Most recently she edited, with Julie Livingston, a special issue of Social Text on "Interspecies." (Spring 2011). She is currently working on a new book on queer disability studies and theories of affect and assemblage titled Affective Politics: States of Capacity and Debility. Her most recent publications from this project are "Prognosis Time: Towards a Geopolitics of Affect, Debility, and Capacity" in Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory (vol 19, no.2, July 2009) and “The Cost of Getting Better: Suicide, Sensation, Switchpoints,” in GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies (Winter 2011). Professor Puar is also a contributor to the Guardian and The Huffington Post, as well as Bully Bloggers (bullybloggers.com) and Oh! Industry (ohindustry.com). Her op-eds have focused on “pinkwashing” in gay and lesbian activism, queer Islamophobia, and the limits and possibilities of the It Gets Better campaign.

American Studies on Ice: Recycling Narratives and Hard Limits in Antarctica
Lecturer: Dr. Elena Glasberg
Affiliation: New York University 
Date: 15 March 2012
Time: 6pm
Place: West Hall, Auditorium C

Elena Glasberg writes about visual art, climate, and neocolonialism. Her book, On Ice: Antarctica as Symbol and Material will be published in 2012 by Palgrave. She teaches in the Expository Writing Program at New York University.

Wearing Shades in the Bright Future of Digital Media: Limitations of US Narratives of Media Power in Egyptian Resistance
Lecturer: Dr. Karin Wilkins
Affiliation: University of Texas - Austin
Date: 29 March 2012
Time: 6pm
Place: West Hall, Auditorium C

Wilkins (PhD, University of Pennsylvania) serves as Professor in the Department of Radio-TV-Film, Director of Media Studies, Associate Director with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and Chair, Global Studies Bridging Disciplines Program at the University of Texas at Austin. Wilkins has won numerous awards for her research, service and teaching, and chaired the Intercultural/Development Division of the International Communication Association. Her work addresses scholarship in the fields of development communication, global communication, and political engagement. Selected works include Questioning Numbers: How to Read and Critique Research (Oxford University Press, 2011), Home/Land/Security: What we learn about Arab Communities from Action Adventure Film (Lexington Books, 2008), Re-Developing Communication for Social Change (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000) as well as journal publications in Critical Studies in Media Communication; Communication Theory; Media, Culture & Society; Journal of Communication; Journal of Middle East Media; International Journal of Communication; Communication for Development and Social Change: A Global Journal; Global Media Journal; Gazette: The International Journal for Communication Studies; Development & Change; and Perspectives on Global Development and Technology.

Bricktop's Paris: African American Women Expatriates in Jazz Age Paris
Lecturer: Dr. Tracy Sharpley-Whiting
Affiliation: Vanderbilt University  
Date: 4 April 2012
Time: 6pm
Place: West Hall, Auditorium A

T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting (Ph.D., Brown University, 1994) is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Distinguished Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies and French. She teaches comparative diasporic literary and cultural movements, 18th & 19th century French narratives, Black France, Black Europe, colonialism and empire, critical theory and race, feminist studies, Jazz Age Paris, film and black popular culture. She is the Director of African American and Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt University where she is also Director of the W.T. Bandy Center for Baudelaire and Modern French Studies (http://www.library.vanderbilt.edu/bandy/). She is the author/editor or co-editor of eleven books. Her latest, Pimps Up, Ho's Down: Hip Hop's Hold on Young Black Women, received the 2007 Emily Toth Award from the American Culture Association/Popular Culture Association for the Best Single Work by One or More Authors in Women's Issues. She lectures widely in the United States and abroad, has offered commentary on a range of issues for Fox, MSNBC, NPR, C-SPAN2, and CBS News. She was the 2006 winner of the Horace Mann Medal for Distinguished Graduate School Alumni from Brown University. She has recently edited and translated, Beyond Negritude: Essays from Woman in the City (SUNY Press), a book on Paulette Nardal and the Martinican journal La Femme dans la Cité as well as a collection on Barack Obama's "A More Perfect Union" address entitled, THE SPEECH: Race and Barack Obama's "A More Perfect Union" for Bloomsbury USA (2009) . She is co-editor of Black France/France Noire (Duke UP), the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (2nd Edition) and series editor of "Blacks in the Diaspora" (Indiana University Press) and co-editor with Robert Bernasconi of "Philosophy and Race" (SUNY Press). She is senior co-editor of Palimpsest: A Journal of Women, Gender and the Black International, published by the State University Press of New York (SUNY).

The New English Empire: The Domestic Political Role of the Early American Missions Movement
Lecturer: Dr. Sam Haselby
Affiliation: CASAR- AUB
Date: 24 April 2012
Time: 6pm
Place: West Hall, Auditorium A

Sam Haselby is a historian of American political culture.  He was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows (2007-10).  He earned his PhD in history at Columbia University and taught at the Bard Prison Initiative and at The New School University.  His book The Origins of American Religious Nationalism, 1776-1832, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.  He has an article on a heresy trial, and its relation to the largest Native American uprising in U.S. history, forthcoming in the May 2012 Past & Present. He has also written for several popular publications, most recently on politics and religion in American history for The Guardian.

TBA
Lecturer: Dr. Alexandra Shuelthis
Affiliation: TBA
Date: 9 May 2012
Time: 6pm
Place: West Hall, Auditorium C

TBA
Lecturer: Dr. Michael Kessler (co-sponsored with IFI)
Affiliation: Georgetown University 
Date: 10 May 2012
Time: TBA
Place: TBA

TBA
Lecturer: Dr. Josie Saldana
Affiliation: TBA
Date: 15 May 2012
Time: 6pm
Place: West Hall, Auditorium C

TBA
Lecturer: Dr. Elizabeth Esch
Affiliation: TBA
Date: 22 May 2012
Time: 6pm
Place: West Hall, Auditorium A

United States Spring: The Self-Emancipation of Slaves and the Spread of Jubilee after the Civil War
Lecturer: Dr. David Roediger
Affiliation: University of Illinois 
Date: 24 May 2012
Time: 6pm
Place: West Hall, Auditorium A

David Roediger teaches history and African American Studies at University of Illinois. He was born in southern Illinois and educated in public schools in that state, with a B.S. in Ed from Northern Illinois University.  He completed a doctorate in History at Northwestern in 1979.  Roediger has taught labor and Southern history at Northwestern, University of Missouri and University of Minnesota.  He has also worked as an editor of the Frederick Douglass Papers at Yale University. He has written on U.S. movements for a shorter working day, on labor and poetry, on the history of radicalism, and on the racial identities of white workers and of immigrants.  His books include Our Own Time , The Wages of Whiteness, How Race Survived U.S. History, and Towards the Abolition of Whiteness, all from Verso, Colored White (California), and Working Towards Whiteness (Basic).  His edited books include an edition of Covington Hall’s Labor Struggles in the Deep South (Kerr), and another of W.E.B. Du Bois’s John Brown (Random House/Modern Library) as well as Black on White:  Black Writers on What It Means to Be White (Schocken).  The former chair of the editorial committee of the Charles H. Kerr Company, the world’s oldest radical publisher, he has been active in the surrealist movement, labor support and anti-racist organizing.