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02/04/2008CCAS 2008 Kareema Khoury Annual Distinguished Lecture
Dr. Henry Laurens, Professor and Chair of History of the Contemporary Arab World at the Collège de France, Paris, presented the 2008 Kareema Khoury Annual Distinguished Lecture at 6:00pm on February 21, 2008. His talk is entitled, "Napoleon and Islam."
About Kareema Khoury
Kareema Khoury was born July 30, 1904. She grew up and was educated in Beirut, Lebanon. She was one of eight children, six of whom emigrated to the US. She had a brother serving in the Air Corps who died in action during WWII. Extremely generous to her family, she took on such responsibilities as sponsoring a nephew to come to the US and subsequently supporting him throughout his education. From 1948-67, she worked as a translator at the Library of Congress. Kareema Khoury passed away March 13, 1986.
Upon her death, an annual distinguished lecture series was established to address pressing topics pertaining to the general arena of Middle East studies. This public address by an outstanding scholar has been an annual tradition at the Center since 1986. Past speakers in the Kareema Khoury Annual Distinguished Lecture Series have included Edward Said, Albert Hourani, Janet Abu-Lughod, Walid Khalidi, Michael Gilsenan, Fedwa Malti-Douglas, Hisham Sharabi, Patrick Gaffney, and Juan Cole. Topics have ranged from The Political Dimension of Islamic Philosophy to the historical formation of the Arab nation to the United States and the Palestinian people, to observations on the historical geography of the Middle East to orientalism.
Biography of Dr. Henry Laurens
Henry Laurens is Professor and Chair of History of the Contemporary Arab World at the Collège de France, Paris, where he lectures on nineteenth-century European-Ottoman and Franco-Arab relations; European intellectual thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; contemporary politics in the Middle East; and the history of Palestine. He holds a Doctorate in History from the Sorbonne–Paris IV, and is the Director for the “Middle East” series published by the CNRS (2001). He has also served as Director of the Department of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the National Institute of Oriental Civilizations and Languages in Paris (INALCO). He is currently member of the High Council of the Institute of the Arab World (IMA) in Paris (2004), and of the Administrative Council of the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology in Cairo (1999).
Professor Laurens has published extensively on topics ranging from the intellectual origins of French Orientalism; the Napoleonic expedition to Egypt; France and the Arab world; Western imperialism and pan-Arabism; and the question of Palestine. Many of his works have been translated into Arabic. In 2000, the Institut de France awarded his essays on Napoleon in Egypt with the prestigious Goby Prize. His doctoral thesis on the intellectual origins of the Napoleonic expedition to Egypt (1698-1798) was completed with high distinction in 1981 under the direction of Professor Dominique Chevallier.
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