News and Events

Academic Freedom in Higher Education - Prof. Asli Ü. Bâli, Yale Law School

  • Academic Freedom in Higher Education - Prof. Asli Ü. Bâli, Yale Law School

    Asli Ü. Bâli is the Howard M. Holtzmann Professor of Law at Yale Law School. She is an expert in international human rights law and comparative constitutional law focused on the Middle East. Dr. Bâli received her doctorate in Politics from Princeton University in 2010 and her law degree from Yale. Before her academic career, she worked for the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and as an associate at Cleary Gottlieb. Shen then went on to UCLA where she was a founding faculty director of the Promise Institute for Human Rights. Dr.

    Axinn Center 229

    Open to the Public

"Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza," a conversation with Prof. Peter Beinart

  • "Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza," A conversation with Prof. Peter Beinart

    Peter Beinart is Professor of Journalism and Political Science at CUNY. He is also a Contributing Opinion Writer for The New York Times, a political commentator on MSNBC, and Editor-at-Large of Jewish Currents. Over the years he served as Editor of The New Republic and wrote for publications like The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Die Zeit, and the Financial Times. He is the author of four books including The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris (Harper, 2010) and The Crisis of Zionism (Times Books, 2012).

    Wilson Hall, McCullough Student Center

    Open to the Public

History Be Dammed: The Promise and Peril of Big Dams in Africa and the Middle East, 1955-1970

This lecture will evaluate the experience of big dams across the Middle East and Africa in the decades following World War II.  Situated at the nexus of intellectual, political, and environmental history, the talk will consider the comparative and global dimensions of dam building between 1950-1970 as well as the impact of these major works both locally and globally. Unlike many environmental or dam histories that often focus exclusively on the experience of one nation or project, this lecture will assess the shared rhetoric of progress and modernity, of industrialization and centralization, and the specific administrative ordering of nature and society that lies at the center of big dam building. Furthermore, it highlights how the quest for an electrified future and modernity resulted in large populations becoming displaced and historical sites and local cultures decimated and submerged.

Magnús T. Bernhardsson is Brown Professor of History and Chair of the Global Studies Program and Director of the Global Scholars Initiative at Williams College. An author of several books on Middle Eastern history in both English and Icelandic, he is currently involved in two major research projects: a) a comparative study of big dams in the Middle East and Africa in the 1950s-1970 and b) as the co-principal investigator in a large research project on the integration of Iraqi and Syrian refugee children in Iceland (2011-present).

Sponsored by the History Department’s Track in the History of Science, Medicine and Technology, Axinn Center for the Humanities, Department of Arabic, Middle East and African Studies (IGS), and Fund for Innovation

Department of History

Axinn Center at Starr Library
Middlebury College
Middlebury, VT 05753

Judy Mayer, Coordinator

Axinn Center at Starr Library 338

(802) 443-5124

jmayer@middlebury.edu

Rebecca Bennette, Department Chair

Axinn Center at Starr Library 333

(802) 443-5853

rbennett@middlebury.edu