Description:

Please join MENA in welcoming Samer Aboud of Villanova University and Nour Halabi of University of Aberdeen for a virtual discussion of post-Assad Syria, moderated by Northwestern's Shayna Silverstein.  This event will be hybrid, and lunch will be served.

Samer Abboud is Associate Professor of Global Interdisciplinary Studies at Villanova University and the author of Syria (Polity, 2018), a book that explores the outbreak and trajectory of the Syrian uprising. His research is broadly interested in warfare in Syria and the emergence of an illiberal post-conflict order in the country. He has recently published articles in journals such as Citizenship Studies, Peacebuilding, Middle East Policy, and The Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding that explore themes of illiberalism, post-conflict order, knowledge production, and Syrian reconstruction. His current research project is interested in the production of fear as a central mechanism of political rule prior to, and during, the period of the conflict, and how Syrians have differentially envisioned and acted upon this fear in cultural production. Samer sits on the Editorial Board of Security Dialogue and is a co-editor of Jadaliyya’s Syria page.

Nour Halabi is an interdisciplinary fellow in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Aberdeen. She is the author of an award-winning book on immigration policy and media coverage entitled Radical Hospitality. Dr. Halabi is the co-editor of two volumes Discourses in Action: What Language Enables Us to Do and Middle Eastern Television Drama: Politics Aesthetics, Practices.  Her interdisciplinary research on the interactions between mobility, social movements and global and Arab media appears in Middle East Critique, Space and Culture, International Journal of Communication and other academic journals.