AIC to present Reading the Arab Spring
The revolutionary wave of demonstrations and protests occurring in the Arab world known as the Arab Spring, will be topic of discussion at American International College. Mary Christina Wilson, Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, will present "Reading the Arab Spring," Tuesday, October 25, at 7:00 p.m. in the West Wing of the Karen Sprague Cultural Events Center.
Mary Christina Wilson
This event is sponsored by the AIC Honors Program, History Department and International Studies Program and is part of the Springfield Public Forum's Fall 2011 "Forum Thinks" programming. The public is invited to attend, free of charge.
Since December 2010 there have been revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt; a civil war in Libya resulting in the fall of its regime; civil uprisings in Bahrain, Syria,and Yemen; major protests in Israel, Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Morocco, and Oman, and minor protests in Kuwait, Lebanon, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Western Sahara. Clashes at the borders of Israel in May 2011 have also been inspired by the regional Arab Spring.
The protests have shared techniques of civil resistance in sustained campaigns involving strikes, demonstrations, marches and rallies, as well as the use of social media to organize, communicate, and raise awareness in the face of state attempts at repression and internet censorship.
Wilson is a specialist on the modern Middle East who serves on the board of directors of the Middle East Studies Association. Her publications include King Abdullah, Britain and the Making of Jordan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) and A Modern Middle Eastern History Reader, ed. with Albert Hourani and Philip S. Khoury (London: Tauris, and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), both of which have been translated into Arabic.
Another book, Syria: A Concise History, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. Her current research project is the study of an 1840 ritual murder trial in Damascus and what that trial tells us about Damascene society, French occupation politics, and the place of Damascus in the Western imagination.
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