Want to understand recent events in Egypt and the surrounding region better? A Teach-in Panel on Turmoils in the Middle East – an area covering North Africa and Western Asia – will be presented this week, featuring York professors from the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies.

The teach-in will take place Thursday, Feb. 10, at 2:30pm at 2183 Vari Hall, Keele campus, with York history Professor Thabit Abdullah, political science Professor Saeed Rahnema, equity studies professors Haideh Moghissi and Nadia Habib.

Abdullah is the author of A Short History of Iraq: From 636 to the Present, Merchants, Mamluks, and Murder: The Political Economy of Trade in Eighteenth Century Basra and the co-editor of Arab and Islamic Studies in Honor of Marsden Jones.

Right: Nadia Habib

A human rights lecturer, Habib was one of the top 10 finalists in TVOntario’s 2010 Big Ideas Best Lecturer Competition. Her research focus is on Egyptian cultural life, but she has also directed, produced and performed in live theatre, and is a poet and activist. She continues to be involved in creative projects and wrote and participated in the narration of A Hot Sand Filled Wind, the third instalment of b.h. Yael's film, Palestine Trilogy: Documentations in History, Land and Hope.

Left: Haideh Moghissi

Moghissi is the author of Feminism and Islamic Fundamentalism: The Limits of Postmodern Analysis, which was translated and reprinted in 2010 by a South Korean publisher, and co-editor of Muslim Diaspora in the West: Negotiating Gender, Home and Belonging, which explores issues of race and ethnicity, culture, media, gender and migration. In 2009, she published a monograph, Diaspora by Design: Muslim Immigrants in Canada and Beyond, co-authored by York political science professors Rahnema and Mark Goodman.

Right: Saeed Rahnema

Rahnema won the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities’ Leadership in Faculty Teaching Award in 2007, the York University-Wide Teaching Excellence Award in 2004 and was named most popular professor at York four years in a row by Maclean’s Magazine's Guide to Canadian Universities. He is author of Iran After the Revolution: Crisis of an Islamic State, Re-birth of Social Democracy in Iran (Baran Books Verlag, 1996) and co-author of Selected Communities of Islamic Cultures in Canada: A Statistical Profile, Diaspora, Islam and Gender Project (2005).

The event is sponsored by the Iranian Human Rights Society at York U and the Middle Eastern Student Association at York U.

Republished courtesy of YFile– York University’s daily e-bulletin