This summer MAAS alum and media specialist Jeffrey Ghannam will return to Georgetown to teach “Media in the Arab World.” The seminar class, which will begin May 21, will explore media coverage of key events in contemporary Middle Eastern history with an eye toward understanding the media’s intertwined roles of informing the public and influencing foreign policies.
The seminar will also review Arab media systems, legal and regulatory regimes, and compare levels of freedom of expression and media business environments relative to other nations and regions. Students will develop the analytical foundation to become critical consumers and potential contributors and influencers of media coverage related to the Arab world. A full course description can be found here.
Ghannam, who graduated from the Master of Arts in Arab Studies program in 1998, is a lawyer, author, international development practitioner, and former Howard R. Marsh Visiting Professor of Journalism at University of Michigan. He has worked with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, along with the Islamic Development Bank in Saudi Arabia, on a $2.5 billion humanitarian relief initiative and led numerous journalism and good governance capacity-building programs in the Middle East and South Asia. Ghannam’s journalism career has included editorial positions at several prestigious publications, including the Detroit Free Press and The New York Times. He has published op-eds in The Washington Post and The Economist and written several reports for the National Endowment for Democracy’s Center for International Media Assistance, including “Social Media in the Arab World: Leading up to the Uprisings of 2011,” “Digital Media in the Arab World One Year After the Revolutions,” and “Media as a Form of Aid in Humanitarian Crises.”
Ghannam recently published an article on media’s role in the Arab Spring in the Winter/Spring 2018 CCAS Newsmagazine.