Political Science

Sabbatical talk by Ali Ahmida, Professor of Political Science

Dr. Shibley Telhami Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development, University of Maryland, Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings. Telhami has taught at a number of universities including Princeton, Swarthmore, USC, Ohio State, Columbia, Cornell, and the University of California at Berkley, where he received his Ph.D. in political science. Among his publications are The Stakes: America and the Middle East (2002) and Power and Leadership in International Bargaining: The Path to the Camp David Accords (1990), as well as numerous other articles and books. This year, Telhami has published two new books: The Peace Puzzle: America’s Quest for Arab-Israeli Peace, 1989-2011 (co-authored, January 2013); and The World Through Arab Eyes: Arab Public Opinion and the Reshaping of the Middle East (June 2013). He was an advisor to the U.S. Mission to the United Nations and to Congressman Lee H. Hamilton (D-Indiana) and, more recently, as senior advisor to George Mitchell, President Obama’s United States Special Envoy for Middle East Peace (2009-2011). He also served on the Iraq Study Group and on the U.S. Commission on Public Diplomacy. Telhami received a B.A. in mathematics, an M.A. in philosophy and religion, and a Ph.D. in political science. He was selected by the Carnegie Corporation of New York with the New York Times as one of the "Great Immigrants" for 2013

Scott is the distinguished Sterling Professor of Political Science and Professor of Anthropology and is Director of the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University. The author of several books, such as Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed; The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia; Domination and the Arts of Resistance; and Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, Scott is recognized worldwide as an authority on Southeast Asian, peasant, and agrarian studies. His research concerns political economy, comparative agrarian societies, theories of hegemony and resistance, peasant politics, revolution, Southeast Asia, theories of class relations and anarchism. He is currently teaching Agrarian Studies and Rebellion, Resistance and Repression. Scott is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has held grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation, and has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Science, Science, Technology and Society Program at M.I.T., and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He received his bachelor's degree from Williams College and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University. The lecture is sponsored by the UNE Department of Political Science and the Student Club “People of Politics.”

Distinguished Libyan Novelist Ibrahim Al-Koni discusses his books on May 2, 2011.

Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, Ph.D., Professor & Chair in the Department of Political Science at the University of New England, spoke on "Why Tunisia, Why Egypt? The Democracy Uprising" on February 15, 2011.

Professor Ahmida describes his intellectual journey from growing up in a small town in Libya to sojourns Cairo, Italy and finally the United States.