Summer Session 2009
Sunday-Wednesday, August 2–5, 2009
Faculty
Katrinka (KC) Somdahl-Sands is a political/cultural geographer. Her courses at Macalester include Introductory Human Geography, Gender, Place & Culture, Regional Geography of the Middle East, Spaces of Citizenship, and People and the Environment. After completing her dissertation on how artists are able to manipulate public space to create political communities through their art, KC recently spent a year as a visiting professor at National University of Ireland, Galway.
Ceasar Farah was born in Portland Oregon; he received his early education at International College of American University of Beirut, then earned a B.A. at Stanford and M.A. and Ph.D. at Princeton. He served in the U.S. foreign service in India and Pakistan, before beginning his teaching career. He founded the nation’s first undergraduate center for Middle East Studies at Portland State, then founded similar programs at three other universities. He has been at the University of Minnesota since 1969, and chaired the program in Middle East and South Asian Studies. He has taught at Harvard and at Cambridge University in England, and is a three-time Fulbright Scholar. He has published 12 books of which one, Islam, appears in seven editions.
Paul Schadewald supports academic service-learning, community-based research, and public scholarship, helping the Macalester community understand and engage its urban environment. He holds a Ph.D. in history from Indiana University with special interests in urban history, public history, and religious studies.
Khaldoun Samman was born in Zarqa, Jordan, and moved to New Jersey at a young age. He earned his B.A. from George Washington University and completed his Ph.D. at Binghamton University. His book Cities of God and Nationalism: Mecca, Jerusalem and Rome as Contested World Cities was released in 2007. He also co-edited a book, Islam and the Orientalist World-System (2008). He is completing a book manuscript entitled The Clash of Modernities: The Islamist Challenge and the Making and Unmaking of the “New” Jew, Turk, and Arab to be released in July 2009. He teaches courses that range from social theory to Islam and the West. His special fields of interest include Eurocentric cultural understandings of Islam and Muslims and historical/comparative sociology.
Paula Cooey received her Ph.D. in religion from Harvardand taught for eighteen years at Trinity University before moving to Macalester in 1999. She teaches courses in history of Christian traditions; Christianity and culture; religion, politics, and economics; ethics; and theory and method in the study of religion. In addition to numerous articles in scholarly journals, she has published several books, among them, Religious Imagination and the Body: A Feminist Perspective (Oxford University Press, 1994) and Family, Freedom, & Faith: Building Community Today (Westminster John Knox Press, 1996). Her most recent book is Willing the Good: Jesus, Dissent, and Desire (Augsburg Fortress Press, 2006).
Binnur Ozkececi-Taner received her Ph.D. from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and an M.A. degree from the University of Notre Dame. Her research and teaching interests include the politics of the Middle East, the role of ideas in international relations and comparative politics, and foreign policy decision making. Her previous and forthcoming publications have appeared in International Studies Review, Foreign Policy Analysis, Turkish Studies, Perceptions, International Journal of Middle East Studies, and British Journal of Middle East Studies.
Joëlle Vitiello teaches 20th century French and francophone literature, as well as literature associated with Haiti, Africa, and immigration. She specializes in contemporary writing by women, and she has published on women writers from Canada, Haiti, France, Belgium, and Africa. Recently, she spent a semester in Tunisia studying Tunisian and immigration cinema under a Mellon Fellowship. While there, she co-organized a conference on cinema in North Africa on behalf of the American Institute of Maghrebi Studies. She has presented on cinema at several recent professional conferences.
Wessam El-Meligi is associate professor of English at Alexandria University in Egypt. . At Macalester. he is teaching Early Arabic Literature and History, 20th Century Arabic Literature and History, and Intermediate Arabic. He has recently published papers on The Arabian Nights, Naguib Mahfouz, and Radwa Ashur's Granada trilogy. He is currently interested in comparative cultural studies and the interaction between the Arab and/or Islamic world and Western cultures.