Watson Events

Asef Bayat -- The Arab Spring and Its Surprises

"The Arab Spring and Its Surprises," with Asef Bayat, Aga Khan Visiting Professor in Islamic Humanities.

Asef Bayat will give the keynote lecture at the Arab Revolutions and Scholarship Conference.

Asef Bayat is the Inaugural Aga Khan Visiting Professor in Islamic Humanities at Brown University, and Professor of Sociology and Middle Eastern Studies at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was Professor of Sociology and Middle Eastern studies and held the Chair of Society and Culture of the Modern Middle East at Leiden University, The Netherlands. He was the Academic Director of the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM) and ISIM Chair of Islam and the Modern World at Leiden University from 2003 until 2009. 

He has published widely on issues of political sociology, social movements, urban space and politics, the everyday of politics and religiosity, contemporary Islam, and the Muslim Middle East. He has conducted extensive studies on the Iranian Islamic Revolution, Islamist movements in comparative perspective since the 1970s, the non-movements of the urban poor, Muslim youth, and women, and on the politics of fun.

The lecture is cosponsored by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Office of the Vice President for International Affairs, the Office of the Dean of the Faculty, the Middle East Studies Program, and the Watson Institute for International Studies.

Location: Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street.