Spring 2013 Speakers
Doug Sunders
April 16 and 17, 2013
Doug Saunders is European Bureau Chief for the Toronto Globe and Mail and contributes a weekly column on global social and political trends to the newspaper's Focus section. Based in London, Saunders reports on European issues and international social and political trends.
Saunders is the author of two books. His first, "Arrival City" (2011), examines the "final great migration" of people from the agricultural countryside to industrial cities, both from a micro, first-person perspective as well as from a macro perspective. Saunders blends "intimate personal portraits with brilliant social analysis" and aims to "change the way we think about globalization."
His second and current book, "The Myth of the Muslim Tide: Do Immigrants Threaten the West?" (2012), is intended as a follow-up to "Arrival City" and a "rejoinder" to fears of a suffocating tide of Islamic immigrants and their subsequent corruption of Western values. In "Muslim Tide," Saunders details both the popular myths of the "Islamic threat" to the West after 9/11 and the actual realities of Muslim immigration, integration, and public perception.
Saunders's events with NOCMES are sponsored by the British Council and funded through the Council's Our Shared Future program, which seeks to "improve the public conversation about Muslims and intercultural relations in the US and Europe".
Spring 2012 Speakers
Prof. Amaney Jamal
February 9 and 10, 2012
Amaney Jamal is Associate Professor of Politics at Princeton University, and she currently directs the Workshop on Arab Political Development. Jamal's current research focuses on democratization and the politics of civic engagement in the Arab World. She extends her research to the study of Muslim and Arab Americans, examining the pathways that structure their patterns of civic engagement in the US.
Jamal has written four books. Her first book, Barriers to Democracy, which won the Best Book Award in Comparative Democratization at the American Political Science Association (2008), explores the role of civic associations in promoting democratic effects in the Arab World. Her second book, an edited volume with Nadine Naber (University of Michigan), looks at the patterns and influences of Arab American racialization processes. She is revising a third book on patterns of citizenship in the Arab world, tentatively entitled Of Empires and Citizens: Authoritarian Durability in the Arab World (under contract with Princeton University Press). Jamal is also a co-author on the book, Citizenship and Crisis: Arab Detroit after 9-11.
Finally, Jamal is working on a new single-authored book project entitled Living Poverty: The Urban and Rural Poor in Comparative Development. Jamal is a principal investigator of the "Arab Barometer Project," winner of the Best Dataset in the field of Comparative Politics: Lijphart/Przeworski/Verba Dataset Award (2010); co-PI of the "Detroit Arab American Study," a sister survey to the Detroit Area Study; and Senior Advisor on the Pew Research Center Projects focusing on Islam in America (2006) and Global Islam, (2010). In 2005, Jamal was named a Carnegie Scholar.
Anthony Shadid
Anthony Shadid tragically passed away on 16 February 2012 while on assignment for The New York Times in northern Syria. Mr. Shadid was due to be NOCMES's second spring speaker. He will be dearly missed, not least of all by the members of the Consortium. More information on Mr. Shadid's life and work can be found in a Times article.
Anthony Shadid was the Beirut Bureau Chief for The New York Times. Before joining the Times, Mr. Shadid served as the Baghdad bureau chief of The Washington Post. Over a 15-year career, he has reported from most countries in the Middle East. Shadid has actively covered the Arab Spring uprisings, the fall of Muammar Gaddafi's government in Libya. In March 2011, Shadid and three other Times journalists were captured and held for six days by the Libyan government. More recently, Shadid has covered the ongoing civil war in Syria.
He has won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting twice: in 2004 for his coverage of the United States invasion of Iraq and the occupation that followed and in 2010 for his coverage of Iraq as the United States began its withdrawal. In 2007, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of Lebanon. He has also received the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ award for deadline writing (2004), the Overseas Press Club’s Hal Boyle Award for best newspaper or wire service reporting from abroad (2004), and the George Polk Award for foreign reporting (2003).
Mr. Shadid is the author of two books, "Legacy of the Prophet: Despots, Democrats and the New Politics of Islam," published by Westview Press in December 2000. His second book, "Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War," was published in September 2005 by Henry Holt. His third book, entitled "House of Stone" and set in his family’s ancestral village in southern Lebanon, is due to be published in March 2012.
Dr. Naif Al-Mutawa
May 1 and 2, 2012
Dr. Naif Al-Mutawa is Founder and CEO of Teshkeel Media Group, for whom he created THE 99, the first group of comic superheroes born of an Islamic archetype. THE 99 has received positive attention from the world’s media. Recently, Forbes named THE 99 as one of the top 20 trends sweeping the globe and most recently, President Barack Obama praised Dr. Naif and THE 99 as perhaps the most innovative of the thousands of new entrepreneurs viewed by his Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship.
He received the Eliot-Pearson Award for Excellence in Children's Media from Tufts University, the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations “ Marketplace of Ideas” Award, The Schwab Foundation Social Entrepreneurship Award presented at the 2009 World Economic Forum and has been named as one of WEF's Young Global Leaders for 2011.
Al-Mutawa has a PhD in Clinical Psychology from Long Island University where he also earned a Masters Degree in Clinical Psychology. He holds a Masters in Organizational Psychology from Teacher’s College, Columbia University and an MBA, also from Columbia University. He earned his undergraduate degree from Tufts University, where he triple majored in clinical psychology, English literature and history.