STONEHILL TO HOST ITS FIRST WOODROW WILSON FELLOW

The 2008 academic year will be off to a stellar start when Stonehill hosts a week-long visit from Woodrow Wilson Fellow Augustus Richard Norton. This is the first visit from a Wilson Fellow in the College’s history.

A teacher, author, scholar, and preeminent expert on the Middle East, Norton will visit campus from February 24 through February 29, 2008 as a guest of the Martin Institute and Director Peter Ubertaccio.

Norton, professor of international relations and anthropology at Boston University, currently focuses his research and writing on strategies of reform in authoritarian regimes of the Middle East.

He is specifically interested in how political reform in the Middle East has been implemented or thwarted, and how we might learn from the limits of the Bush administrations’ project for promoting democracy in the area.

Norton has held academic appointments at New York University and the United States Military Academy.   A former U.S. Army officer and combat veteran, he was a military observer for the United Nations in southern Lebanon when Hezbollah and rival Shi'i parties were forming there in the early 1980s. He has conducted research in Lebanon for close to three decades.

His latest book is Hezbollah: A Short History.  Earlier books include Political Tides in the Arab World (co-author); Amal and the Shi’a: Struggle for the Soul of Lebanon, considered to be a classic account of the political mobilization of Lebanon's Shi'i Muslims;  and the two-volume collection Civil Society in the Middle East.

A sought-after international relations expert, Norton’s interviews have appeared in such media outlets as The New York Times and the The Wall Street Journal. His articles have appeared in a range of leading professional journals and newspapers.

Norton consults with U.S. government agencies on Middle Eastern topics, and in 2006 was an advisor to the Iraq Study Group.

He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations,  the Middle East Studies Association, the American Anthropological Association, the American Political Science Association, the Academic Board of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, and he is a co-founder of the Boston Forum on the Middle East and the Conference Group on the Middle East.

Among his many research and writing grants are those from the Rockefeller, Ford, and MacArthur foundations. He has held Senior Fulbright Research Grants for Bangladesh, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, and Norway. In 2006-2007 he lived in Egypt and the Persian Gulf area.

In January and early February 2008, Norton began new research on the Persian Gulf state of Bahrain, which he will also discuss during his campus visit.

About the Woodrow Wilson Foundation

Founded in 1945 as a program of doctoral fellowships to encourage the nation’s best and brightest to pursue careers as college teachers, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation has supported more than 21,000 intellectual leaders in the arts and sciences, business, and public service.

The original Woodrow Wilson Fellows now include eleven Nobel Laureates, as well as many others internationally recognized for their accomplishments. 

12/18/07