How did the Arab-Israel conflict evolve into the current confrontation between Israel and the Hamas movement in Gaza? A look at the historical context and broader forces that have shaped the conflict over time.

Alan Dowty is Affiliate faculty member at the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies and is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of one of the leading textbooks on Israel and Palestine: Israel/Palestine. (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 4th edition, 2017) as well as numerous other books and publications on the subject.

Sponsored by the Middle East Center, Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington. Co-sponsored by the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies, Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington and the Department for Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, University of Washington. Contact: mecuw@uw.edu.

The Middle East Center presents One Man, Many Disasters: What is Next For Turkey? on March 2, 2023, a talk by Reşat Kasaba (Professor & former Director, Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington). This lecture was part of a panel titled Shocks & Aftershocks of the Turkey-Syria Earthquake held on March 2, 2023 at the University of Washington.

Reşat Kasaba is an expert in the history and politics of the Middle East and has taught undergraduate and graduate students at the School for over 30 years. He is a recipient of a UW Distinguished Teaching Award. His courses cover a wide range of topics including economic history, state-society relations, migration, ethnicity and nationalism, urban history in the Middle East, U.S. foreign policy and world history. Kasaba served as the director of the Jackson School for 10 years, completing his tenure in June 2020. He is currently researching history of U.S. foreign policy in Turkey, and the political consequences of rural-urban divide in modern Turkey.

Sponsored by the Middle East Center, Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington. Contact: mecuw@uw.edu.

The Middle East Center presents Why did the Earthquake Happen & Why was it so Destructive: A Geologic Perspective on Turkey’s Major Earthquake Zones on March 2, 2023, a talk by Scott L. Montgomery (Geoscientist and Lecturer, Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, Affiliate Faculty, Earth and Space Sciences, University of Washington). This lecture was part of a panel titled Shocks & Aftershocks of the Turkey-Syria Earthquake held on March 2, 2023 at the University of Washington.

Scott L. Montgomery is an author, geoscientist, and affiliate faculty member in the Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington. He writes and lectures on a wide variety of topics related to energy (geopolitics, technology, resources, climate change), American politics, intellectual history, language and communication, and the history of science. He is a frequent contributor to online journals such as The Conversation, Forbes, and Fortune, and his articles and op-eds are regularly featured in many outlets, including Newsweek, Marketwatch, The Huffington Post, and UPI. He also gives public talks and serves on panels related to issues in global energy and their relation to political and economic trends and ideas of sustainability. For more than two decades, Montgomery worked as a geoscientist in the energy industry, writing over 100 scientific papers and 70 monographs on topics related to oil and gas, energy technology, and industry trends.

Sponsored by the Middle East Center, Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington. Contact: mecuw@uw.edu.

2022-23 VOICES IN MIDDLE EAST STUDIES LECTURE SERIES: Featuring Groundbreaking Scholarship in the Field of Middle East Studies

The Middle East Center presents Social Change Through Presence: White Marriage in Iran on February 13, 2023, a talk by Maral Sahebjame(graduate student in the Interdisciplinary Near and Middle Eastern Studies PhD program and a graduate fellow in the Department of Law, Societies, and Justice at the University of Washington).

In 2014, a Tehran-based women’s magazine published a report on “white marriage” (local term for cohabitation) and was temporarily banned for its alleged promotion of white marriage as the office of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei condemned it for being shameful and contradictory to Islamic values. Since then, academics across the country have held town halls, clerics have made official comments, and health officials have expressed their concerns for the rise in white marriages. As new generations of Iranians re-articulate their desires and expectations in intimate partner relationships, they force state and legal actors to rethink contemporary forms of marriage and re-examine the legal code and system. Using data from ethnographic fieldwork in Iran, this talk examines white marriage through the lens of academics, psychologists, clerical actors, legal actors, and those who are engaged in white marriages. In so doing, it finds that through their everyday practices and their “power of presence,” those engaged in white marriages rewrite gender and marriage norms while participating in a social non-movement that effects social change.

Maral Sahebjame is a graduate student in the Interdisciplinary Near and Middle Eastern Studies PhD program and a graduate fellow in the Department of Law, Societies, and Justice at the University of Washington. Her research focus and interests include gender in the Middle East and Muslim-majority societies, ethnography, social movements, and state, law, and society relations in contemporary Iran. Her dissertation title is: “Marriage across the Color Spectrum: Making Commitment Palatable in Iran.”

Sponsored by the Middle East Center, Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington. Contact: mecuw@uw.edu.

The Middle East Center presents States of Power: Gender & Protests in Iran on November 28, 2022, a panel discussion with Nazanin Shahrokni (London School of Economics) and Peyman Safari (College of William & Mary), moderated by Arzoo Osanloo (University of Washington).

“A Feminist Revolution?” Rethinking Protests through a Feminist Lens – Nazanin Shahrokni 

Nazanin Shahrokni is a sociologist and an assistant professor of gender and globalization at the London School of Economics, where she directs the MSc program for Gender and Gender Research. Her scholarly work is located at the intersection of gender and globalization, feminist geography, and ethnographies of the state in Iran, the Middle East and beyond. Nazanin is the author of the award-winning book Women in Place: The Politics of Gender Segregation in Iran (UC Press 2020). She also serves on the Executive Committee of the International Sociological Association.

Labor & State in Iran: From the 1979 Revolution to the 2022 Protests – Peyman Jafari 

Peyman Jafari is Assistant Professor of History and International Relations at the College of William and Mary. His research focuses on the social history of revolutions and the role of the labor movement in contemporary Iran, and the relationship between empires, labor, and ecology in the global history of oil. He is currently writing a monograph titled Oil and Labor in the Iranian Revolution: A Social History of Uneven and Combined Development.

Sponsored by the Middle East Center, Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington. Contact: mecuw@uw.edu.

2022-23 Voices in Middle East Studies: Featuring Groundbreaking Scholarship in the Field of Middle East Studies

The Middle East Center presents “Feeding People is not Enough:” Local Humanitarianism in the Palestinian Refugee Camps of Jordan on November 14, 2022, a talk by Gozde Burcu Ege (Ph.D. candidate in the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in Near and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Washington).

In 2016, the UNHCR reported that the average time a refugee will spend in a refugee camp is 17 years. Although refugees are typically treated in terms of emergency and crises, these data underscore the fact that many refugees spend much, if not most, of their lives outside of their homelands, living in a state of permanent temporariness. Perhaps no other refugee community better represents the problem of protracted exile than the Palestinians. In this talk, I present the insights I gained from my field research with youth volunteers in the Palestinian refugee camps of Jordan and aim to demonstrate the unique approaches Palestinian youth developed to respond the needs of their fellow camp inhabitants.

Gozde Burcu Ege is a Ph.D. candidate in the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in Near and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Washington. Her research interests include refugee studies, humanitarianism, and youth in the Middle East. She is currently writing her dissertation for which she conducted two and a half years of ethnographic research in Amman, Jordan. Utilizing mixed qualitative methods in multiple Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, her dissertation investigates how Palestinian refugee-citizen youth who have long been conceived as recipients of humanitarian aid are themselves practicing voluntary humanitarianism in a context of ordinary precarity, receding international aid and new waves of refugees in Jordan. Burcu was the pre-doctoral fellow of Mellon Sawyer Seminar, Humanitarianisms during 2020-2021.

Sponsored by the Middle East Center, Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington. Contact: mecuw@uw.edu.