Contact: Sammy McDavid
STARKVILLE, Miss.--"America and the Middle East" will be the topic next week for a public forum at Mississippi State.
The four-session event will take place Tuesday and Wednesday [April 12 and 13] in the university's Simrall Hall auditorium and John Grisham Room of Mitchell Memorial Library.
The MSU history department is sponsoring the program with support from the Mississippi Humanities Council.
Featured speakers will include Jon B. Alterman, director of the Middle East Program of the Center for Strategic and International Studies; John Calvert, a Middle Eastern historian at Creighton University; and Christopher A. Preble, director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute.
Both the CSIS and Cato Institute are Washington, D.C.-based public policy research institutes. Creighton University is a Catholic Jesuit institution located in Omaha, Neb.
The forum sessions include:
--Preble's presentation, "Contemplating the U.S. Policy for a Post-Cold War, Post 9/11, Post-Iraq-War Middle East," at 6 p.m. Tuesday in the Simrall auditorium;
--Alterman, on "Moving Beyond Nationalism: Expatriate Communities, International Causes, Shifting Identities, and Global Security," at 10 a.m. Wednesday in the Grisham Room; and
--"Sources and Actors of Radical Islam," to be led by Calvert at 2 p.m. Wednesday, also in the Grisham Room.
The 2005 forum concludes at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday with a general discussion of U.S.-Middle East policies among the visiting speakers. The panel and audience will gather in the Simrall auditorium.
For additional information on the program or speakers, contact associate history professor Richard V. Damms at (662) 325-8821 or rdamms@ra.msstate.edu.