Editor: Keith Davis Writers: Dave Maley, Mike Warwick Publisher: Office of Public Information Volume 22, No. 7   November 15, 1999

Middle East Expert Will Be This Year‘s Woodrow Wilson Fellow Augustus Richard Norton, Ithaca College’s 1999 Woodrow Wilson fellow in residence, will conclude a week of classes and meetings with faculty and students on Thursday, November 18, with a keynote address, "Mistaking Muslims for Wal-Mart — and Other Perils." The talk, scheduled for 7:00 p.m. in Park Hall Auditorium, is free and open to the public. In the three days before his talk, Norton will visit classes dealing with politics, multi-culturalism, and the global flow of information. He is also scheduled for meetings with students and faculty members. A professor of international relations and anthropology at Boston University, Norton has spent close to two decades studying developments in the Middle East. In 1979 he concluded a year of intensive Arabic language training at the U.S. Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, and later spent two years serving as an unarmed military observer attached to the United Nations Interim Force in southern Lebanon. Norton was a commentator for the 1987 documentary film The Sword of Islam, which won an International Emmy Award. In addition, he was a consultant on another documentary, The Struggle for Peace, which was funded by the MacArthur and Ford Foundations and appeared on PBS in 1992. He has written and edited several books, including Amal and the Shi’a: Struggle for the Soul of Lebanon, Political Tides in the Arab World, and The International Relations of the PLO. His numerous articles on the Middle East have appeared in such journals as Current History, Foreign Policy, and Middle East Journal and in newspapers that include the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor, and Washington Post. Norton received his doctorate in political science from the University of Chicago in 1984. He has been a visiting research professor at New York University and was a visiting associate professor in the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. The Woodrow Wilson visiting fellows program brings leaders in their fields to college campuses in an effort to unite people from diverse backgrounds and with differing points of view. Visiting fellows, who include cabinet-level officers, corporate executives, newspaper editors, and other professionals, are recruited for their ability to listen as well as to articulate ideas. They are matched with colleges chosen for their commitment to equipping students for the social, political, and economic environment they will be entering after graduation. The weeklong visit allows visiting fellows to express their ideas fully and provides the opportunity for students and faculty to gain a better understanding of the world outside the campus. The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation has developed and conducted programs in higher education since 1945. More than 200 colleges have participated in the visiting fellows program since 1973. For more information call the Office of the Assistant Provost for Special Programs at 274-3063.

Created by Andrejs Ozolins. Updated 12. Nov. 1999