The College of Arts and Sciences announced three more events as part of its ongoing spring 2024 educational series of talks on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
Given the complexity of the problems surrounding the conflict in Gaza and the West Bank and the understandably high feelings on both sides, this multi-part spring educational series approaches this very sensitive topic from various perspectives.
On Monday, March 4, the Department of Philosophy and Religion and the College of Arts and Sciences will sponsor “Student-to-Student: UTC Students in Conversation via Zoom with Students from Ben Gurion University of the Negev.” The digital event is only open to UTC students. The students at Ben Gurion University are both Arab and Jewish and will share their stories about life since October 7.
On Wednesday, March 27, the Department of History and the College of Arts and Sciences are sponsoring a conversation with Sari Bashi. The event will take place at 3 p.m. in the University Center Signal Mountain Room.
Bashi, who will participate via Zoom, is the program director at Human Rights Watch— leading the organization’s research, supervising a staff of 270 people in 50 countries, and working on 18 regional and thematic human rights areas. Prior to joining Human Rights Watch, she co-founded and ran Gisha, the leading Israeli human rights group promoting the right to freedom of movement for Palestinians in Gaza. She has taught international humanitarian law at Yale Law School and Tel Aviv University and supervised research at Democracy for the Arab World Now.
On Monday, April 1, the Department of History, Department of Political Science and Public Service and the College of Arts and Sciences have partnered to sponsor “The History of Israel/Palestine and the Geopolitics of the Middle East.” Associate Professor of History Annie Tracy Samuel and UC Foundation Associate Professor of Political Science and Public Administration Saeid Golkar, both members of the UTC faculty with expertise in Middle East history and politics, will lead the noon discussion in the University Center Signal Mountain Room.
Tracy Samuel’s scholarship has been published in International Security, Diplomatic History, and Harvard’s International Security Discussion Papers series, and her commentary on current events has been featured by The Hill, Lawfare, CNN and The Atlantic. Her book on Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and the Iran-Iraq War, titled “The Unfinished History of the Iran-Iraq War: Faith, Firepower, and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard,” was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022.
Golkar is a non-resident Senior Fellow on Middle East Policy at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change in the United Kingdom. His first book, “Captive Society: The Basij Mobilization and Social Control in Post-Revolutionary Iran,” published by Columbia University Press in 2015, was awarded the Washington Institute Silver Medal prize. He has been published in numerous journals, including Middle East Journal; Armed Forces and Society; Politics, Religion and Ideology; Middle East Policy; Journal of Contemporary Islam; Middle East Quarterly; and the Journal of Emerging Technologies and Society.