Expert on Iraqi women to speak at Ohio State

COLUMBUS - The role of women in modern-day Iraq will be the topic of a talk by an expert in the field at on Monday, April 9, at noon at The Ohio State University’s Mershon Center for International Security Studies.

Nadje Al-Ali, senior lecturer in social anthropology at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter in Britain, will speak on “Iraqi Women Between Dictatorships, Wars, Sanctions and Occupation.”

Al-Ali specializes in women’s issues in the Middle East, especially women’s movements and activism in Egypt and Iraq.  She is a founding member of Act Together: Women's Action on Iraq, which works to raise consciousness about the effect of war and occupation on women. She is currently researching the role of women and gender in political transition in post-2003 Iraq.

Al-Ali is author of Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2000), and editor of New Approaches to Migration (Routledge, 2002).

Her most recent book, just published, is Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present (Zed Publishers). She will be signing the first copies available in the United States after her talk.

The event is sponsored by the Mershon Center for International Security Studies, which fosters interdisciplinary research on national security in a global context, along with Women in Development, the Middle East Studies Center, and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures.

About the Mershon Center for International Security Studies
The Mershon Center for International Security Studies advances the understanding of national security in a global context by fostering interdisciplinary faculty and student research in three areas of focus: the use of force and diplomacy; the ideas, identities, and decisional processes that affect security; and the institutions that manage violent conflict. The Mershon Center is a unit of the Office of International Affairs at The Ohio State University.