The history and culture of Afghanistan and the surrounding region will be discussed by University of Wisconsin-Madison faculty in the lecture series, Humanities Forums on the Middle East, sponsored by the UW-Madison's Center for the Humanities in conjunction with the Dane County Library Service. All talks free and open to the public.
What are our rights and obligations as American citizens in the aftermath of September 11? How well do we really understand the Constitution and the protections it affords us in times of crisis? UW-Madison faculty will address these and other questions in the Center for the Humanities Forums: The Constitution Now, a series of five lectures at 7 p.m. on Tuesdays from Jan. 29 to Feb. 26 in public libraries throughout Dane County.
|
Michael
Chamberlain |
Chamberlain has spent many years conducting research, lecturing and traveling in Iran, Syria, Turkey, and Egypt and throughout the region, including much of Afghanistan. His areas of study include Syria, Egypt, and Iraq during the Crusades, Islamic Law, Islamic intellectual history, military history, including recent military history. He is currently working on a biography of Ibn Taymiyya, a 14th-century intellectual and dissident seen by many, as the first modern-style Islamist political activist. Chamberlain is also the author of Knowledge and Social Practice in Medieval Damascus, 1190-1350.
|
Muhammad
Memon |
Muhammad Memon specializes in the languages and literature of the Islamic world. He has translated and edited fiction and non-fiction in Urdu, a language used by Muslims, including the books An Epic Unwritten: The Penguin Book of Partition Stories from Urdu and Domains of Fear and Desire, Urdu Stories. He also participated in the making of Islam in South Asia, a video in the series Exploring the Religions of South Asia produced by WHA-TV. Memon was educated in Pakistan and received his Ph.D. in Islamic Studies at UCLA. In addition to his extensive work in South Asian studies, he is a trustee of the American Institute of Pakistan Studies and has served on the American-Pakistan Research Organization.
Mark Kenoyer focuses his research on the Indus Valley and has worked in Pakistan and India, where he was born, for the past 26 years. He has conducted archaeological research and excavations at both Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, two of the most important early sites in Pakistan, and has also worked in western and central India. Kenoyer's areas of specialization include ancient technologies and crafts, socio-economic and political organization as well as religion. These interests have led him to study a broad range of cultural periods in South Asia as well as other regions of the world. He is the author of Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization and his work is most recently featured in the June 2000 issue of National Geographic Magazine.
David Morgan's research and teaching interests focus on the history of Islam, the Middle East and Mongols. He is the author of Medieval Persia 1040-1797 from the "History of the Near East Series;" and The Mongols of the "Peoples of Europe" series. He edited The Mongol Empire and Its Legacy from the series "Islamic History and Civilization, Studies and Texts;" and Medieval Historical Writing in the Christian and Islamic Worlds. Morgan is currently writing a history of the Middle East in the Islamic period, to be called The Heartlands of Islam, for the "Blackwell History of the World;" as well as a book on Iran during the Mongol period (13-14th centuries), called Ghazan Khan and His Historian.
ASharon Hutchinson focuses her research on Sudan, where a brutal civil war has been raging since 1983 between an Arab Muslim majority population in the North and an African and Christian minority in the South. Fluent in Arabic and Nuer, a southern Sudanese language, Hutchinson has conducted many years of anthropological field investigations on war-provoked processes of social and economic change among the second largest ethnic group in the South. Her most recent research efforts have concentrated on the plight of displaced southern Sudanese in Khartoum and on ethnic conflict, oil development and religious change in the South. She is author of a prize-winning book entitled Nuer Dilemmas: Coping with Money, War and the State as well as numerous journal articles. In addition to her scholarly writings, Sharon Hutchinson has worked extensively with international humanitarian agencies active in the southern Sudan, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Doctors Without Borders and Save the Children Fund.
Zaeske discusses the "speech acts" that have been employed by U.S. presidents in response to national crises such as the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Cuban missile crisis, and the events of September 11. She also presented video and audio excerpts of Roosevelt's "Declaration of War," Kennedy's "Quarantine Speech," and Bush's "Speech to the Joint Session of Congress and the American People" while discussing the strategies of persuasion they employed to justify military action within Constitutional limits and to rally the American people.