Jan. 7, 2005- The Middle East Center (MEC) at the University of Utah, one of 15 national resource centers in the U.S. devoted to the academic study of the Middle East, will sponsor a series of six public lectures titled “U.S. Public Diplomacy in the Middle East.” The presentations are part of the MEC’s continuing mission to increase understanding of Middle East history, culture, religions, literature, politics and contemporary dynamics. Each free lecture, followed by a question-and-answer discussion, will be held from 3 until 4:30 p.m., in the Dumke Auditorium in the Museum of Fine Arts, located south of the David Eccles School of Business.
Ibrahim Karawan, director of the U’s Middle East Center, notes that “this year’s series will prove to be as successful as in past years because we have scheduled lectures in which the themes are timely, the perspectives are diverse, the speakers are prominent experts and the audience is global.”
The scheduled lectures are as follows:
Monday, Jan. 24: Shibley Telhami, Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland, College Park and former Professor of International Relations at Cornell University and Princeton University.
Thursday, Feb. 17: Ambassador Martin Indyk, director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy and senior fellow of Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution, former U.S. Ambassador to Israel and former Undersecretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs under President Clinton.
Wednesday, March 2: Hisham Melhem, veteran Washington correspondent for the leading Lebanese daily newspaper As-Safir and host of the weekly Al-Arabiya television program “Across the Ocean.”
Please note: Hisham Melhem, on March 2, will speak from 2-3:30 p.m.
Wednesday, March 9: Ambassador Dennis Ross, counselor and Ziegler Distinguished Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and former presidential peace envoy to the Middle East and former member of the policy planning staff at the U.S. Department of State.
Wednesday, March 23: Judith Kipper, director of the Middle East Forum, Council on Foreign Relations and senior fellow of the Middle East Program, Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
Tuesday, Apr. 5: Edward P. Djerejian, former U.S. Ambassador to Israel, U.S. Ambassador to Syria and founding director of the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University.
The series of lectures is presented in collaboration with the University of Utah’s the Office of the President, Office of the Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs, College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, College of Humanities, and Department of Political Science, along with private as well as corporate donations. The Middle East Center at the University of Utah is funded by the United States Department of Education under Title VI of the Higher Education Act. Established in 1960, the Center offers all levels of academic degrees and arranges opportunities for intensive language study, fieldwork and research in a number of countries in the Middle East. The Center also provides students and the greater community with a variety of opportunities for the advancement of understanding of the Middle East, which include conferences, lectures, continuing education courses and outreach activities.
For more information on the upcoming lecture series, call the Middle East Center at the University of Utah at 801-581-6181 or visit http://www.mec.utah.edu.