Main Menu

Munir Akash

Naseer Aruri

Hani A. Faris

Mujid S. Kazimi

Saree Makdisi

NOTE:

The Conference was highly successful. More than 500 people attended the two-day sessions. Conference proceedings were covered by the USA and international media. To view a video tape of the sessions, check out: http://www.arabichour.org . A Conference Declaration was issued in three languages, English, Arabic and Hebrew, and has since appeared in various newspapers and professional journals. Copies of the Declaration are attached:

Boston Declaration English Text.pdf
Boston Declaration Arabic Text.pdf
Boston Declaration Hebrew Text.pdf

A volume featuring the Conference papers will be published in 2010.

Conference Co-Chairs & Conference Program Committee

CONFERENCE CHAIRS

Hani A. Faris

Munir Akash

CONFERENCE PROGRAM COMMITTEE

1. Munir Akash --- Visiting Professor at Suffolk University, Boston. Founding editor of Jusoor. Co-author of On Poetry, Sex and Revolution (1971), co-editor of The Adam of Two Edens (2001) and Post Gibran (2000), authored The Right to Sacrifice the Other (2002), The Talmud According to Uncle Sam (2004), The Idea of America (2003), Understanding America (2006) and edited The Open Veins of Jerusalem (2005). [Co-chair of the conference]

2. Naseer Aruri --- Chancellor Professor (Emeritus) of Political Science, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. He has published nine books, including THE DISHONEST BROKER, THE OBSTRUCTION OF PEACE: THE US, ISRAEL AND THE PALESTINIANS, JORDAN: A STUDY IN POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT and PALESTINE AND THE PALESTINIANS: A SOCIAL AND POLITICAL HISTORY( WITH SAMIH FARSOUN). He co edited (with Muhammad Shuraydi) REVISING CULTURE, REINVENTING PEACE: THE INFLUENCE OF EDWARD W. SAID). He edited OCCUPATION: ISRAEL OVER PALESTINE. He published numerous articles and book chapters and is a founding member of the Arab Organization for Human Rights(Cairo and Geneva) and former member of the boards of Amnesty International USA and Human Rights Watch/Middle East. He has appeared on the Lehrer News Hour, CNN Crossfire, ABC News, and he is a commentator on Pacifica Radio, the BBC, Radio Monte Carlo, and the Voice of America. He was a contributor to Middle East International (London) since 1980, al-Hayat, al-Mustaqbal and other Arab dailies and weeklies. He is a former President of the Arab American University Graduates and a member of the Palestine Center and a board member of the Jerusalem Fund in Washington.

3. Hani A. Faris --- Professor of Political Science. Presently serves as Adjunct Professor in the Department of Political Science & Fellow in the Institute of Asian Research at The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. Acting Chairperson of Trans Arab Research Institute (TARI) & former President of the Association of Arab American University Graduates (AAUG). Member of the editorial board of the journal Contemporary Arab Affairs (London). Author of Sectarian Conflict in the Modern History of Lebanon (1980); Beyond the Lebanese Civil War (1982); co-authored The Arab Position on the Israeli Invasion of Lebanon (1983); U.S. Policy in the Middle East: The Nixon Era (1984); The Nexus Between Palestine, Iraq and Lebanon (2007); and edited Arab Nationalism and the Future of the Arab World (1987). [Co-chair of the conference]

4. Mujid S. Kazimi --- Professor of Nuclear and Mechanical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the current and founding director of the Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems (CANES) at MIT. He has authored more than two hundred papers in journals and conferences and the two-volume textbook Nuclear Systems on thermal hydraulic analysis of nuclear reactors. Former president of the Association of Arab American University Graduates (AAUG).

5. Saree Makdisi --- Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA. He has published extensively on the culture of modernity in Europe and its afterlife in the contemporary Arab world. He is the author of three books, Romantic Imperialism (1998); William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (2003), Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation (2008) and has contributed articles to leading academic journals as well as edited volumes. In addition to his scholarly publications, he has published a number of commentaries on the Middle East in the editorial pages of newspapers including The Chicago Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Houston Chronicle, An-Nahar (Beirut), The Nation, The London Review of Books, and particularly The Los Angeles Times, to which he is a frequent contributor.