Boston College (BC) is a private Catholic Jesuit research university in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1863 by the Society of Jesus, the university has more than 15,000 total students.
Benedictine University is a private Catholic university with campuses in Lisle, Illinois, and Mesa, Arizona, United States. It was founded in 1887 by the Benedictine monks of St. Procopius Abbey in the Pilsen community on the West Side of Chicago. The institution has retained a close relationship with the Benedictine Order, which bears the name of St. Benedict, the acknowledged father of western monasticism.
The Islamic University of Madinah is a public Islamic university in Medina, Saudi Arabia. Established by King Saud bin Abdulaziz in 1961, the institute is said to have been associated with Salafism, while claiming to have exported Salafi-inclined theologians around the world. Others disagree and state that the institution is objective and scientific, being detached to any singular ideology. It received institutional academic accreditation without exceptions from the National Commission for Academic Accreditation and Assessment in April 2017.
Aga Khan University is a not-for-profit institution and an agency of the Aga Khan Development Network. It was founded in 1983 as Pakistan's first private university. Starting in 2000, the university expanded to Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, the United Kingdom and Afghanistan.
Georgetown University in Qatar (GU-Q) is a campus of Georgetown University in Education City, Doha, Qatar. It is one of Georgetown University's eleven undergraduate and graduate schools, and is supported by a partnership between Qatar Foundation and Georgetown University.
Fred McGraw Donner is a scholar of Islam and Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Near Eastern History at the University of Chicago. He has published several books about early Islamic history.
Alexander Kronemer is a writer, lecturer, and documentary filmmaker whose work focuses on religious diversity, Islam, and cross-cultural understanding. He is the co-founder and executive producer of Unity Productions Foundation. Alex Kronemer is the co-founder of Unity Productions Foundation (UPF), its Executive Director, and Executive Producer for all UPF Films. He is an internationally known speaker and has published numerous articles newspapers and journals in the US and abroad, including The Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, the Huffington Post and in syndication in international publications as widespread as the UK, Indonesia, Egypt, and Pakistan. He frequently presents at 20,000 Dialogue events, and has appeared as a CNN commentator on several occasions. Mr. Kronemer has won numerous awards for his work in promoting peace and interfaith understanding. A graduate of Harvard Divinity School, he previously served in the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Human Rights and was one of the founding staff members who helped establish the U.S. Institute of Peace.
Lasell University (LU) is a private university in Newton, Massachusetts. It was founded in 1851 as a women's seminary. It became a college in 1932, a four-year institution in 1989, coeducational in 1997, and a university proper in 2019. The campus spans 54 acres and is located in the village of Auburndale.
James L. Gelvin is an American scholar of Middle Eastern history. He has been a faculty member in the department of history at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) since 1995 and has written extensively on the history of the modern Middle East, with particular emphasis on nationalism and the social and cultural history of the modern Middle East.
Syrians are the majority inhabitants of Syria, indigenous to the Levant, who have Arabic, especially its Levantine and Mesopotamian dialects, as a mother tongue. The cultural and linguistic heritage of the Syrian people is a blend of both indigenous elements and the foreign cultures that have come to rule the land and its people over the course of thousands of years. By the seventh century, most of the inhabitants of the Levant spoke Aramaic. In the centuries after the Muslim conquest of the Levant in 634, Arabic became the dominant language, but a minority of Syrians retained Aramaic (Syriac), which is still spoken in its Eastern and Western dialects.
Boston University Wheelock College of Education & Human Development is the school of education within Boston University. It is located on the University's Charles River Campus in Boston, Massachusetts in the former Lahey Clinic building. BU Wheelock has more than 31,000 alumni, 32 full-time faculty and both undergraduate and graduate students. The School of Education is a member institution of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE).
Mohamad Bazzi is a Lebanese-American journalist. He is the former Middle East bureau chief at Newsday and a current faculty member of New York University. He is currently director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at New York University. From 2019 to 2021, he was the associate director of NYU's Journalism Institute. Bazzi was the 2007–2008 Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. From 2009 to 2013, he served as an adjunct senior fellow for Middle East Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Ira M. Lapidus is an Emeritus Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic History at The University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of A History of Islamic Societies, and Contemporary Islamic Movements in Historical Perspective, among other works.
Hatoon Ajwad al-Fassi is a Saudi Arabian historian, author and women's rights activist. She is an associate professor of women's history at King Saud University in Saudi Arabia, where she has been employed since 1989 and at the International Affairs Department at Qatar University. At the university, al-Fassi carries out historical research. Based on her research into the pre-Islamic Arabian kingdom of Nabataea, al-Fassi claims that women in the ancient kingdom had more independence than women in modern Saudi Arabia. Al-Fassi was active in women's right to vote campaigns for the 2005 and 2011 municipal elections and was active in a similar campaign for the 2015 municipal elections. She was arrested in late June 2018 as part of a crackdown on women's rights activists and was released almost a year later, in early May 2019.
Suad Joseph received her doctorate in Anthropology from Columbia University in 1975. Dr. Joseph is Professor of Anthropology and Women and Gender Studies at the University of California, Davis and in 2009 was President of the Middle East Studies Association of North America. Her research addresses issues of gender; families, children, and youth; sociology of the family; and selfhood, citizenship, and the state in the Middle East, with a focus on her native Lebanon. Her earlier work focused on the politicization of religion in Lebanon. Joseph is the founder of the Middle East Research Group in Anthropology, the founder and coordinator of the Arab Families Working Group, the founder of the Association for Middle East Women's Studies, the general editor of the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures, and the founding director of the Middle East/South Asian Studies Program at the University of California at Davis. She is also the founder and facilitator of a six-university consortium of the American University of Beirut, American University in Cairo, Lebanese American University, University of California at Davis, and Birzeit University Consortium.
An undergraduate research journal is an academic journal dedicated to publishing the work of undergraduate research students. Such journals have been described as important for the professionalization of students into their academic discipline and a more substantive opportunity to experience the publication and peer review process than inclusion in the acknowledgments or as one of many authors on a traditional publication. The model has been described as well established in the United States and as a potential extension to the traditional undergraduate dissertation written by students in the United Kingdom. A case study of student participation in the journal Reinvention: A Journal of Undergraduate Research, found that the process challenges the "student as consumer" model of higher education.
Morrissey College of Arts & Sciences (MCAS) is the oldest and largest constituent college of Boston College, situated on the university's main campus in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. Founded in 1863, it offers undergraduate and graduate programs in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences.
Heather J. Sharkey is an American historian of the Middle East and Africa, and of the modern Christian and Islamic worlds. Her books and articles have covered topics relating to nationalism, imperialism, colonialism, postcolonial studies, missionary movements, religious communities, and language politics, especially in Egypt and Sudan. She is currently Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States.
Ahmad Al-Jallad is a Jordanian-American philologist, epigraphist, and a historian of language. Some of the areas he has contributed to include Quranic studies and the history of Arabic, including recent work he has done on pre-Islamic Arabian inscriptions written in Safaitic and Paleo-Arabic. He is currently Professor in the Sofia Chair in Arabic Studies at Ohio State University at the Department of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures. He is the winner of the 2017 Dutch Gratama Science Prize.
Mafaz Al-Suwaidan is a Kuwaiti American academic and current doctoral candidate at Harvard University. She is also a producer and writer for American Muslims (2024), a PBS film series of short documentary films.
