"America and the Arab Struggle for Self-Determination"

(Ezio Cappadocia Memorial Lecture on Politics and History)

8:00 PM Monday, February 06, 2012
University Theatre

Ussama S. Makdisi is the first holder of the Arab-American Educational Foundation Chair of Arab Studies at Rice University. A 1997 graduate of the history Ph.D. program at Princeton University, he rapidly established himself as a leading scholar of the Ottoman Empire, the Arab World in the Twentieth Century, and Islam and the West. The Carnegie Corporation named him a 2009 Carnegie Scholar as part of its effort to promote original scholarship about Muslim societies and communities, both in the United States and abroad.

Professor Makdisi explores Arab perspectives and archives in his prize-winning research. He will discuss the missed opportunities for cultural understanding between the United States and Islam, countering the notion of an inevitable clash of civilizations.

Professor Makdisi's book publications include:

The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon (2000)

Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (2008; winner of the 2008 Albert Hourani Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association, the 2009 John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association, and a co-winner of the 2009 British-Kuwait Friendship Society Book Prize given by the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies)

Faith Misplaced: The Broken Promise of U. S.-Arab Relations, 1820-2001 (2010)

He also is the co-editor of Memory and Violence in the Middle East and North Africa (2006). His articles on Ottoman and Arab history have appeared in the Journal of American History, the American Historical Review, and other major journals.

"The Origins of Sectarianism in the Modern Middle East"

Faculty-Student Seminar (in collaboration with the Philosophy Forum)

3:10 PM Monday, February 06, 2012
Gallagher Business Building 123