Iranian Studies Symposium
"Iran's Politics & Policies: Presidential Election of 2009 and Iran's Nuclear Policies"
Friday, October 2, 2009
Location: Lucy Ellis Lounge (room 1080, Foreign Languages Building)
Please see the symposium flyer for a printable version of these details. You are welcome to participate in any or all parts of the symposium.
Please see the symposium program for more details.
Schedule of Events
| 10:00am-10:05am |
Opening RemarksHadi Salehi Esfahani, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign"Turmoil in Iran's Politics and Policies" |
| 10:05am-10:50am |
Keynote SpeechMuhammad Sahimi, University of Southern California"Iran's Nuclear Policies: What and Why" |
| 11:00am-12:30pm |
Panel 1: Iran's Nuclear Policies and the International ResponseChair: Colin Flint, University of Illinois at Urbana-ChampaignKaveh Ehsani, DePaul University "Understanding Iran's Nuclear Policies: Historical Genealogy of Iranian State Attitudes Towards White Elephant Projects" Clifford Singer, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign "Nuclear Technology Acquisition in Iran: Economic and Political Motives" Robert Naiman, Just Foreign Policy "U.S. Response to Iran's Nuclear Policies" |
| 2:00pm-3:45pm |
Panel 2: Iran's President Election of 2009: What Happened?Chair: Edward Kolodziej, University of Illinois at Urbana-ChampaignHadi Salehi Esfahani, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign "Presidential Election of 2009 in Iran: Some Facts and Key Questions" Muhammad Sahimi, University of Southern California "The Leaders of Iran's Election Coup" Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign "Electoral Politics and the Politics of 2009 Presidential Election in Iran" Kaveh Ehsani, DePaul University "Endgame? A Socio-Political Analysis of Iran's Ruling Elite" |
| 4:00pm-5:30pm |
Panel 3: Future Trends in Social and Political Change in IranChair: Anna-Maria Marshall, University of Illinois at Urbana-ChampaignAsef Bayat, Leiden University "The Green Movement and Iran's Unfinished Revolution" Norma C. Moruzzi, University of Illinois at Chicago "Quiet Leadership and Pressure from Below: Iranian Women Before and After June 2009" Robert Naiman, Just Foreign Policy "U.S. Diplomatic Engagement with Iran After the Iranian Election" |
| 5:30pm-5:45pm |
General Discussion and Concluding RemarksChair: Hadi Salehi Esfahani, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign |
| 6:15pm |
ReceptionThe Bread Company, 706 S Goodwin Ave., Urbana |
About Our Speakers
Asef Bayat, Professor of Sociology and Middle East Studies, holds the Chair of Society and Culture of the Modern Middle East at Leiden University, The Netherlands. His research areas range from social movements and non-movements, to religion-politics-everyday life, Islam and the modern world, urban space and politics, and international development. His books include Street Politics: Poor People’s Movements in Iran (Columbia University Press, 1997) and more recently Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn (Stanford University Press, 2007), and Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2009).
Kaveh Ehsani is an Assistant Professor of International studies at DePaul University in Chicago. He is a member of the editorial board of Goftogu Quarterly in Tehran, and of Middle East Report in Washington DC. He is the author of more than 30 articles on the political economy and the social geography of Iran. He is completing a book manuscript titled "Oil and Society: Abadan and the Making of Modern Iran."
Hadi Salehi Esfahani is a Professor of Economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and serves as Director of the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. He has also worked for the World Bank as a visiting staff economist and a consultant. His theoretical and empirical research is in the field of political economy of development, focusing in particular on the Middle East and North Africa region. He has published numerous articles on the role of politics and governance in fiscal, trade, and regulatory policy formation. Professor Esfahani is the Editor-in-Chief of the Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance and currently serves as the President of the Middle East Economic Association.
Colin Flint is Director of the Program in Arms Control, Disarmament, and International Security (ACDIS) and associate professor of Geography and Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He currently leads the ConflictSpace research project and is an expert on modeling political processes using spatial analysis and GIS. He is author, co-author or editor of Geography of War and Peace (2005) Introduction to Geopolitics (2006), Political Geography: World-Economy, Nation-State, and Locality (2006), and Spaces of Hate (2004).
Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi is Associate Professor of History and Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Islam and Dissent in Postrevolutionary Iran (I.B.Tauris/Palgrave MacMillan, 2008). He is the co-editor of the special volume of Radical History Review (Fall 2009, no. 105) on the thirtieth anniversary of the Iranian Revolution. His research is on Islamic movements and modern Islamic social thought and has published on these themes in various academic journals. Currently, he is working on a book manuscript on the conception of trauma and social reintegration of the Iranian veterans of Iran-Iraq war.
Edward Kolodziej, Research Professor Emeritus of Political Science, is the Director of the Center for Global Studies at the University of Illinois. He has written or edited fourteen books on security, foreign policy, and global politics; contributed more than 100 articles to professional journals; and lectured in over 40 countries around the world. His latest publication is Security and International Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2005). He is currently working on a volume on the theory and practice of global governance.
Anna-Maria Marshall is the head of the department of Sociology at UIUC. Her research focuses on legal consciousness, as well as law and social movements in the United States and in transnational arenas.
Norma Moruzzi is Associate Professor of Political Science, Gender and Women’s Studies, and History, and Director of the International Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research interests focus on the intersections of gender, religion, and national identity, particularly for Jewish and Muslim women. Her current project is a book analyzing transformations in Iranian women’s lives since the 1979 Revolution, tentatively titled Tied Up in Tehran: Women, Social Change, and the Politics of Daily Life. Since 1998 she has been regularly conducting field-work in Iran, as well as participating in and conducting workshops for women’s groups and contributing to local journals.
Robert Naiman is Policy Director and National Coordinator at Just Foreign Policy. Naiman has worked as a policy analyst and researcher at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch. He has masters degrees in economics and mathematics from the University of Illinois and has studied and worked in the Middle East.
Muhammad Sahimi is Professor and Chairman of Chemical Engineering at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. He obtained his BS from the University of Tehran (Iran) in 1977 and his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis in 1984, both in chemical engineering. He has been a faculty member at USC since 1984, and has also been a visiting professor in Australia, Europe, the US, and the Middle East, and a consultant to many industrial corporations. He has published over 220 papers in peer-reviewed journals and four books. Among his honours are the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Award and the United Nations UNESCO Khwarizmi Award for distinguished achievements in science.
Cliff Singer's research includes data-calibrated probabilistic extrapolations of fusion reactor performance at the University of Illinois, a statistically systematic survey of global uranium resources at the International Atomic Energy Agency, supervision previous and current thesis research on energy econometrics, and development and instruction of courses on Energy Systems and Security. Additional activities include research and conference organization in the areas of international conflict and cooperation. He is the author of Energy and International War: From Babylon to Baghdad and Beyond.
Sponsors
The Iranian Studies Symposium is organized and hosted by the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. Co-sponsors include: the Program in Arms Control, Disarmament, and International Security (ACDIS); the Center for Global Studies (CGS); the Department of History; the Department of Political Science; the Department of Sociology; the European Union Center (EUC); the Illinois Network on Islam and Muslim Societies (I-NIMS); and Parkland Reads Program (Parkland College).