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Jonathan Berkey to Give Lecture on “Jihad, Crusade and the New World Order”

Jonathan Berkey, the James B. Duke Professor of International Studies and chair of the History Department at Davidson College, will give a lecture at Washington and Lee University on March 25, at 5 p.m. in the Hillel House.

The title of Berkey’s lecture is “Jihad, Crusade and the New World Order.” It is free and open to the public.

Berkey will discuss the American public’s obsession with jihad in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, and explore “the ideological response to the complicated political history of relations between the Muslim world and the West over the last two centuries.”

His publications include “The Transmission of Knowledge in Medieval Cairo: A Social History of Islamic Education” (1992); “Popular Preaching and Religious Authority in the Medieval Islamic Near East (2001); and “The Formation of Islam: Religion and Society in the Near East, 600-1800” (2003), which was awarded the Albert Hourani Book Prize by the Middle East Studies Association of North America. Berkey is currently completing a narrative history of the Middle East since the rise of Islam.

He has served as associate editor of the “New Dictionary of the History of Ideas” and the “Encyclopedia of Islam” (3rd ed.).

Berkey has received fellowships from Fulbright-IIE, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Research Center in Egypt. From 1994-95 he was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and in 2000, served as professor invité at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.

He earned his B.A. from Williams College and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University. Before joining the faculty at Davidson, he taught at Princeton University and Mount Holyoke College.