Bates presents panel on the United States and the Middle East

As a follow-up to a well-attended discussion last month about the United States and Iraq, Bates College presents a panel discussion about the United States and the Middle East at 7 p.m. Thursday, May 13, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave. The public is invited to attend at no charge. For more information, call 207-786-6195.

Participants are moderator James Richter, professor of political science, Bates College; Arlene MacLeod, associate professor of political science, Bates College; Dov Waxman, assistant professor of government, Bowdoin College; and Jon Custis, U.S. Marine Corps captain and a member of the Bates College Class of 1991, who will participate via speaker-phone. Panel members will offer remarks and then open the discussion to the audience. Planned topics will range from the war in Iraq to religious fundamentalism to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Proficient in Russian and German, Richter is the author of Khrushchev’s Double Bind: International Pressures and Domestic Coalition Politics (Johns Hopkins, 1994) and the essay “Russian Foreign Policy and the Politics of National Identity,” included in the collection The Sources of Russian Foreign Policy After the Cold War (Westview, 1999). A member of the Bates faculty since 1987, he received the 1992 Bates Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching.

The author of Accommodating Protest: Working Women, the New Veiling, and Change in Cairo (Columbia University Press, 1991) and several articles on women and political change,  MacLeod teaches courses in political theory, area studies (Middle East and China) and women and politics. Her current research interests include the study of political imagination, politics and literature, and alternative ways of writing about politics, such as the personal essay and historical fiction.

Waxman teaches international relations and Middle Eastern politics. A former faculty member at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey, and a visiting fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle East and African Studies at Tel Aviv University, Israel, Waxman also has worked as a researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a foreign policy think-tank in Washington, D.C.  He is the author of three monographs, The Crisis of Identity in Post-Kemalist Turkey: Domestic Discord and Foreign Policy (1998), The Islamic Republic of Iran: Between Revolution and Realpolitik (1998) and Immigration and Identity: A New Security Perspective in Euro-Maghreb Relations (1997), all published by the Research Institute for the Study of Conflict and Terrorism. Widely published in scholarly journals, Waxman is writing a book, Defending/Defining the Nation: The Pursuit of Peace and the Crisis of Israeli Identity.

Custis received his Bates degree in political science with a focus on international affairs. He joined the Marine Corps in 1992 and is a company commander of a Light Armored Reconnaissance battalion. He served in Somalia in 1994, and in Iraq and Kuwait from February through June 2004. He will return to Iraq in fall 2004.