Mari Luomi is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the CIRS for the academic year 2011-2012. She holds a PhD in Middle Eastern Studies from Durham University. She has previously worked in various positions for the Middle East Project and the Programme in the International Politics of Natural Resources and the Environment of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs.
Gwen Mikell, Professor of Anthropology and Foreign Service at Georgetown University, gave a CIRS Focused Discussion on the subject of “The Kofi Annan Legacy for Africa” on November 2, 2011. She noted that the lecture grew out of a project that she began in 2006, where she was invited to write about Kofi Annan’s African initiatives over…
On November 13–14, 2011, CIRS held a two-day working group meeting, to discuss issues related to its research initiative on “Food Security and Food Sovereignty in the Middle East.” The working group consisted of experts in the field who deliberated the historical, economic, and political aspects of the discourse as well as specific case studies…
On November 14, 2011, Eckart Woertz, Visiting Fellow at Princeton University, delivered a CIRS Monthly Dialogue lecture titled, “Arab Food, Water, and the Big Gulf Land-Grab that Wasn’t.” Woertz placed the question of food security within a historical and cultural context. Food, he said, has historically been a highly politicized commodity and has been subject to political maneuvering…
From 1980 to June 2011, he was the Majid Khadduri professor and Director of Middle East Studies at The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He began his academic career after receiving his PhD in political science from the University of Washington in 1973. He is the author of The Arab Predicament, The Vanished Imam, Beirut: City of Regrets, and The Dream Palace of the Arabs, The Foreigner’s Gift: The Americans, the Arabs and the Iraqis in Iraq and other works.
Walter B. Denny, Professor of Art History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, gave a CIRS Monthly Dialogue lecture on “Innovation in the Visual Arts of Islam: New Ways of Looking at Islamic Art” on December 12, 2011. The lecture was a follow-up to a previous one Denny gave for CIRS at the “Innovation in Islam” conference…
On January 23, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, delivered the first CIRS Monthly Dialogueof 2012 titled, “Being a Citizen of the World Today.” Appiah’s lecture was centered on the question of global citizenship and how historical intellectual theories of “cosmopolitanism” have a bearing on how people live their lives in the contemporary…
On February 13, 2012, Peter Bergen delivered the 2011-2012 CIRS Faculty Distinguished Lecture titled, “The Awakening: How Revolutionaries, Barack Obama, and Ordinary Muslims are Remaking the Middle East.” In addition to being CNN’s security analyst, Bergen is a Schwartz Fellow at the New American Foundation and an adjunct lecturer in public policy at the Kennedy School of Government at…
On February 19–20, 2012, CIRS held a two-day working group meeting on the topic “The Evolving Ruling Bargain in the Middle East.” Several scholars and experts on the Middle East were invited to CIRS at Georgetown University’s Qatar (GU-Q) campus to take part in the discussions. At the conclusion of the research initiative, the working group…
On February 21, 2012, Ahmad H. Sa’di, Professor in the Department of Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University of Negev, delivered a CIRS Monthly Dialogue on the topic “Population Management and Political Control: Israel’s Policies towards the Palestinians in the First Two Decades, 1948-1968.” Sa’di based his lecture on the results of investigations into historical and archival…
On February 26, 2012, CIRS hosted a Focused Discussion with Ambassador James Larocco Distinguished Professor and Director of the Near East South Asia Center at the National Defense University in Washington, DC. The talk titled, “The Gulf Looking East: Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Iran,” was supported by the United States embassy in Qatar. Citing full academic freedom, Larocco gave…
Shahla Haeri, a cultural anthropologist and a 2011-2012 CIRS Visiting Scholar, gave a Focused Discussion titled, “From Bilqis to Benazir: Women and Political Leadership in Muslim Societies” on February 26, 2012. Haeri’s current research interests revolve around examining Muslim women in positions of power, both past and present. Haeri began her talk by critiquing western media accounts…