For FULL LIST of Spring Lectures see our poster!

NEW Poster for Fall 2009 Lectures will be available by September 2009

                   2009-2010 Islam in the Public Square Lecture Series

Fall 2009

“ The Role of the Council of Pakistan’s Islamic Ideology ”

Khalid Masud, Islamic Studies, McGill

September 22, 2009, 12:00-1:00pm, Flowers 201

  Khalid Masud (Ph.D. Islamic Studies, McGill) is Chairman of the Council of Islamic Ideology in Pakistan, Government of Pakistan. Fluent in English, he is among the most important thinkers on the role of Islam in Pakistani state and society today. He was, from 1999-2003, the Academic Director of the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World in Leiden. He also has an old intellectual association with Prof. Barbara Metcalf, and is being invited at this time so that he can participate in a retirement conference focused on her work from Sept. 11-13, 2009, at the University of Michigan. Both Khalid Masud's extensive scholarship and his official position make him an important presence in Pakistan studies, particularly to the analysis of the role of Islam in the Pakistan state.

Dr. Masud's lecture is sponsored with Center for South Asian Studies

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"Eurabia: Truth or Paranoia?" 

Ian Buruma, Cultural Studies and Journalism, Bard College,           

October 15, 2009,5:00pm, Sanford Fleishman Commons

The Kenan Institute's Distinguished Lecture 2009

Ian Buruma was educated in Holland and Japan, where he studied history, Chinese literature, and Japanese cinema.

In 1970s Tokyo, he acted in Kara Juro's Jokyo Gekijo and participated in Maro Akaji's butoh dancing company Dairakudakan, followed by a career in documentary filmmaking and photography. In the 1980s, he worked as a journalist, and spent much of his early writing career travelling and reporting from all over Asia. Buruma now writes about a broad range of political and cultural subjects for major publications, most frequently for The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Corriere della Sera, The Financial Times, and The Guardian.  He was Cultural Editor of The Far Eastern Economic Review, Hong Kong (1983-86) and Foreign Editor of The Spectator, London (1990-91), and has been a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin, the Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington D.C., St. Antony's College, Oxford, and Remarque Institute, NYU. He has delivered lectures at various academic and cultural institutions world-wide, including Oxford, Princeton, and Harvard universities. He is currently Henry R. Luce Professor of Democracy, Human Rights, and Journalism at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY.

Dr. Buruma's lecture is  also part of the Kenan Institute of Ethics 2009 Distinguished Lecture in Ethics

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" Land and Rebellion: Kurdish Separatism in Comparative Perspective " (pdf)

Benjamin Smith, Political Science, University of Florida, Gainesville

October 19, 2009, 12:00-1:30pm, Flowers 201

Benjamin Smith, Associate Professor (Ph.D. U. Washington 2002) teaches undergraduate courses in comparative and Asian politics, ethnicity and nationalism, post-conflict peace building and the politics of modernity, and graduate courses on ethnicity and nationalism and research design. His first book, Hard Times in the Land of Plenty: Oil Politics in Iran and Indonesia, was published in 2007 Cornell University Press. Smith's research has been published in World Politics, the American Journal of Political Science, Studies in Comparative International Development, the Journal of International Affairs, and other journals and edited volumes. From 2002 to 2004, he was an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. His research focuses on separatist conflicts, regime change and democratization, and on corruption and economic development. Smith is currently working on a book exploring the long-term factors that shape the success of separatist movements, as well as several article-length projects on taxation and democratic breakdown (with Dan Slater), ethnic riots and interethnic relations in Southeast Asia (with Rizal Panggabean), and corruption and economic growth (with Leann Brown, Sarah Howland and Matthew Schwarz).

Dr. Smith's lecture is part of the Comparative Politics Workshop Series.

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"Radical, Religious, and Violent: Economics and Terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan"

Eli Berman, Economics, University of California, San Diego November 3, 2009, 3:45-5:15pm, 111 Social Sciences Building

Eli Berman is a professor of economics at UC San Diego, research director for international security studies at IGCC, and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research interests include economic development and conflict, the economics of religion, labor economics, technological change, economic demography, and applied econometrics. Recent grants from the National Science Foundation (2002 and 2005) have enabled him to look closely at relationships between religion and fertility from an economic standpoint. His latest publications are "Religion, Terrorism, and Public Goods: Testing the Club Model" (with David Laitin) in the Journal of Public Economics (2008), and "The Economics of Religion," in the New Palgrave Encyclopedia of Economics (with Laurence Iannaccone). Berman received his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University. His book Radical, Religious and Violent: The New Economics of Terrorism was recently published (in October) by the MIT Press.

Dr. Berman's lecture is part of the Applied Microeconomics Workshop series.

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"Ottoman-Era Slavery, Mediterranean Regionalism, and World History" (pdf)

Madeline Zilfi, History, University of Maryland, College Park  November 12, 2009, 4:30-6:00pm, 103 Carr Building

Madeline Zilfi specializes in Middle East history in the period of the Ottoman Empire.  Her research interests focus on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly with regard to Ottoman-Islamic urban culture and social movements, Islamic law and legal practice, and women's experience.  She is the author of The Politics of Piety: The Ottoman Ulema in the Post-Classical Age (1988) and editor of Women in the Ottoman Empire: Middle Eastern Women in the Early Modern Middle East (1997).  She was previously editor of the Turkish Studies Association Bulletin and has written on Islamic revivalism, early modern divorce and consumption patterns, the Tulip Era, and slavery.  Her book, Women and Slavery in the Ottoman Middle East, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. 

Dr. Zilfi's lecture is being cosponsored by the Department of History (Duke University).

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“Where Bernard Lewis Went Wrong: Rethinking Secularism Across the Islam-West Divide”

Nader Hashemi, International Studies, University of Denver

November 19, 2009, 12:00-1:30pm, 311 Social Sciences Building

Nader Hashemi received his Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. His research interests lie at the intersection of political theory and comparative politics of the developing world with a regional specialization in the Middle East and the Islamic World. Specific research areas include secularism and its discontents in Muslim societies, Western and modern Islamic political thought, religion-state relations, the politics of Islamic fundamentalism, and the history and development of liberal democracy. His writings have been published by Princeton University Press, McGill-Queen's University Press, Oxford University Press, The Journal of Church and State, Third World Quarterly, Queen's Quarterly, Global Dialogue, Tikkun, The Nation, Chicago Tribune, The Daily Star (Beirut), The Globe and Mail (Toronto) and the Toronto Star. He is the author of Islam, Secularism and Liberal: Toward a Democratic Theory for Muslim Societies (Oxford University Press, 2009). Previously he was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University and a Visiting Assistant Professor and Global Fellow at UCLA’s International Institute. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor of Middle East and Islamic Politics at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver.

Dr. Hashemi's lecture is part of the Political Theory Workshop Series.

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Upcoming SPRING 2010

David Patel, Political Science, Cornell University, January 25, 2010, 12:00-1:30 (location TBD), "Ayatlollahs on the Pareto Frontier: Islam, Information, and Social Order in Iraq, "

Lecture is cosponsored with the Comparative Politics Workshop series.

Ghislaine Lydon, History, UCLA , February 4, 2010, 12:00-1:30pm (location TBD), "Paper Economics, Legal Regimes, and Commerical Logic of Writing in Muslim Africa"

Rhys Williams, Sociology, Loyola University, February 19, 2010, 12:00-1:30pm (location TBD), "Are Second Generation Muslims Creating an American Islam?"

Lecture is cosponsored with the department of Sociology.

Mahmoud El Gamal, Economics, Rice University, March 25, 2010 (Time/Location TBD)

"Oil, Dollars and Crises: The Global Curse of Black Gold"

Lecture is cosponsored with the Nicholas School of the Environment and the Fuqua School of Business

Abdullah An-Naim, Law, Emory University, April 7th, 4:00-5:30pm (location TBD)

"The Compatibility of Islamic Law and State Law"

Lecture is cosponsored with the Duke School of Law.

Islam in the Public Square Lecture Series have been arranged by Prof. Timur Kuran (Economics and Political Science Duke University).