Watson Events

Asef Bayat ─ The Global Middle East: Into the Twenty-First Century

About the Speaker
Asef Bayat is a professor of sociology and the Catherine and Bruce Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Before joining the University of Illinois, he taught at the American University in Cairo for many years; and served as the director of the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM), holding the chair of Society and Culture of the Modern Middle East at Leiden University in the Netherlands. His research areas range from social movements and social change, to religion and public life, urban space and politics, and the contemporary Middle East. His recent books include Being Young and Muslim: Cultural Politics in the Global South and North (ed. with Linda Herrera) (Oxford University Press, 2010); Post-Islamism: The Changing Faces of Political Islam (Oxford University Press, 2013); Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2013. 2nd edition), Revolution without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring (Stanford University Press, 2017), Global Middle East: Into the 21st Century (ed. With Linda Herrera) (University of California Press, 2021), and Revolutionary Life: Everyday of the Arab Spring (Harvard University Press, 2021).