The Center for Contemporary Arab Studies is pleased to present

The American University of Beirut:  Student Activism and National Identities

featuring

Betty Anderson

The American University of Beirut was founded in 1866 by American Protestant missionaries.  In 1920, the Trustees of the then-named Syrian Protestant College voted to rename it the American University of Beirut (AUB) and to remove the missionary goals from its statement of purpose.  Since that time, the University has served as a center of intellectual and political development in the Fertile Crescent.  In the period between the 1930s and the 1950s, the movement of Arab nationalism served as a key intellectual guidepost.  In the late 1960s and 1970s, student energies were directed toward the Palestinian cause.  Upon graduation, the alumni gave birth to political parties and organizations, based on these ideas, in countries throughout the Arab Middle East.

Betty S. Anderson graduated from Trinity College in 1987 as a history and political science major and then received a PhD in Near Eastern History from UCLA in 1997.  She is the author of Nationalist Voices in Jordan:  The Street and the State (University of Texas Press, 2005), The American University of Beirut:  Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education (University of Texas Press, 2011), and State and Society in the Modern Middle East (Stanford University Press, forthcoming 2015).  She has published articles in Civil Wars, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Critique, and Jadaliyya.com, as well as chapters for a number of edited volumes. She has written about the themes covered by Islamic and history textbooks used in Jordan, the politicizing role of education in the twentieth-century Middle East history, and the evolution of the American liberal education system at the American University of Beirut (AUB).

 Lunch will be served.

Contact:

 Marina Krikorian

 Public Affairs Coordinator

 phone: 202-687-6215

 email: ccasevents@georgetown.edu