---

News Release

Last modified: Thursday, January 9, 2003

Martin Kramer, authority on Middle East politics, to speak at IUB

Martin Kramer, internationally renowned authority on contemporary Islam and Arab politics and editor of the Middle East Quarterly, will deliver a lecture at Indiana University Bloomington on Tuesday (Jan. 14) at 8 p.m. in the Chemistry Building, Room 122. The event is free and open to the public.

The lecture is titled "Middle Eastern Studies in America and 9/11: What Went Wrong?" Kramer's visit is sponsored by the Ottoman and Modern Turkish Studies Chair and the Robert A. and Sandra S. Borns Jewish Studies Program, along with the Department of Central Eurasian Studies and the Inner Asian and Uralic National Resource Center.

For the last 30 years, Kramer has offered an alternative reading of the history and politics of the Middle East. He is the editor of the Middle East Quarterly , one of the nation's leading journals of Middle Eastern affairs, and a past director of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University, Israel. In October 2001, he published the critically acclaimed book Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America. The book has received national and international media attention for its critique of Middle Eastern studies in the United States. Additionally, it was hailed as "one of the most important books about understanding the Middle East written during the last half-century" by the Jerusalem Post.

"I'm very excited to meet this author," said Ottoman and Modern Turkish Studies Chair Professor Kemal Silay, who personally arranged Kramer's visit to Bloomington. "His recent work is one of the most impressive books I've ever read in terms of its discourse."

On his Web site, https://www.martinkramer.org, Kramer cites another Middle Eastern scholar, Professor Bernard Lewis, as one of his mentors. Lewis was the Simona and Hart Hasten Visiting Fellow in Jewish Studies at IU Bloomington last fall, and he spoke at IUB on Oct. 23.

Kramer has been a fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., and he has been a frequent fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

---

---