MacKay Lecture Series

 

2007-08 

Identities and Ideologies: Changes and

Transformations in the Modern Islamic World

Lecture One

January 24th, 2008

Reception at 7pm
Lecture at 8pm
Ondaatje Auditorium
Marion McCain Arts and Social Building

"Transing and Transpassing Across Sex-Gender Lines in Contemporary Iran"

Afsaneh Najmabadi, Professor of History and Women's Studies, Harvard University

Iranian-born Afsaneh Najmabadi first came to Radcliffe College from Tehran University in 1966. Although she earned bachelor's and master's degrees in physics at Radcliffe and Harvard, Najmabadi opted to pursue social studies, combining academic interests with her engagement in social activism, first in the US and then in Iran. She has written several books, most recently Women with Mustaches and Men Without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Modernity (UC Press, 2005), as well as The Story of Daughters of Quchan: Gender and National Memory in Iranian History (Syracuse University Press: 1998), and has written and edited books in Persian.

 

Lecture Two

March 6th, 2008

Reception at 7pm
Lecture at 8pm
Theatre A
Tupper Medical Building

"Islamo-Christian Civilization: Erasing the Line"

Richard Bulliet, Professor of History, Columbia University

Professor Bulliet specializes in Middle Eastern history, the social and institutional history of Islamic countries, and the history of technology. He received his B.A. from Harvard in 1962 and his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1967. His is the author of The Patricians of Nishapur: a Study in Medieval Islamic History (1972), The Camel and the Wheel (1975), Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: An Essay in Quantitative History (1979), and Islam: the View from the Edge (1994). He edited Under Siege: Islam and Democracy (1994) and The Columbia History of the Twentieth Century (1998), co-edited The Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East (1996), and co-authored The Earth and Its Peoples: A Global History (1997). Most recently, he published The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization (2004). 

Lecture Three

March 27th, 2008

Reception at 7pm
Lecture at 8pm
Ondaatje Auditorium
Marion McCain Arts and Social Building

"Tradition, Pop Culture, and Jihad: Muslim Diversity in the Contemporary World."

John O. Voll, Professor of Islamic History,  Georgetown University

Professor Voll taught Middle Eastern, Islamic, and world history at the University of New Hampshire for thirty years before taking up an appointment at Georgetown, where he also serves as associate director of the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding.  He graduated from Dartmouth College and received his Ph.D. degree from Harvard University. He has lived in Cairo, Beirut, and Sudan and has travelled widely in the Muslim world. The second edition of his book Islam: Continuity and Change in the Modern World appeared in 1994. He is co-author, with John L. Esposito, of Islam and Democracy and Makers of Contemporary Islam and is editor, author, or co-author of six additional books. He is a past president of the Middle East Studies Association and also of the New England Historical Association.  In 1991 he received a Presidential Medal in recognition for scholarship on Islam from President Husni Mubarak of Egypt. He has published numerous articles and book chapters on modern Islamic and Sudanese history.

 

 

The Mackay History Lecture

November 15th, 2007

"Imagining the King´s Lost Army: Treason Law and Sovereignty Stories in the Early Modern Atlantic World"

7pm, Scotiabank Auditorium, McCain Building

Lauren Benton, Professor of History, New York University

Professor Benton is the author of various works on the comparative legal history of European empires, including Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400-1900 (Cambridge University Press, 2002), which won the James Willard Hurst Prize and the World History Association Book Prize.  She is currently completing Anomalies of Empire: Law, Geographic Imagination, and the Problem of Imperial Sovereignty, a book about the legal conflicts shaping territorial sovereignty in European empires between 1500 and 1900.  Benton received her Ph.D. in Anthropology and History from Johns Hopkins University, and her A.B. from Harvard University.