November 22, 2024

EagleEye

A Newsletter for UMW Faculty and Staff

Al-Tikriti Monitors Kazakhstan Presidential Election

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Associate Professor of Middle Eastern History Dr. Nabil Al-Tikriti (3rd from left) recentlyserved as an election monitor for the Kazakhstan presidential elections.

Associate Professor of Middle Eastern History Dr. Nabil Al-Tikriti (3rd from left) recently served as an election monitor for the Kazakhstan presidential elections.

Associate Professor of Middle Eastern History Dr. Nabil Al-Tikriti served as an election monitor for the Kazakhstan presidential elections on 4-12 June. Joining 29 other Americans in the U.S. delegation of some 300+ observers total, Al-Tikriti worked as an OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) STO (Short Term Observer) in 8-9 rural villages and the main town in the somewhat remote steppe region around Capaev, in Western Kazakhstan province. His observation partner was a Polish human rights activist, based in Prague. For more information on these Kazakhstan elections, and OSCE’s support of these elections, please see:
https://www.osce.org/odihr/elections/kazakhstan/418187

In the course of his visit, Al-Tikriti also spent two days in Uralsk, an oil exploration base in Western Kazakhstan, and two days in the capital Nur Sultan (Astane), where observers carried out preliminary briefings.While in Nur Sultan, he visited Nazarbayev University, the country’s premier higher education facility.

Associate Professor of Middle Eastern History Dr. Nabil Al-Tikriti (2nd from right), recently served as an election monitor for the Kazakhstan presidential elections. Al-Tikriti worked as an OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) STO (Short Term Observer) in 8-9 rural villages and the main town in the somewhat remote steppe region around Capaev.

Associate Professor of Middle Eastern History Dr. Nabil Al-Tikriti (2nd from right), recently served as an election monitor for the Kazakhstan presidential elections. Al-Tikriti worked as an OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) STO (Short Term Observer) in 8-9 rural villages and the main town in the somewhat remote steppe region around Capaev.

Kazakhstan’s ruling party, Nur Otan, had nominated Kassym-Jomart Tokayev as its candidate for a snap presidential vote after he was backed by the country’s founding leader, President Nursultan Nazarbayev, following his resignation in March 2019. In the election itself, state election officials awarded Tokayev 70% of the vote, in line with exit polls announced by state media one hour after polls closed. 

This is the 14th OSCE-monitored election Al-Tikriti has observed since 1997.

McClurken Presents Multi-day Workshop on Digital Liberal Arts Pedagogy in Beirut

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McClurken leading off the workshop with a set of shared resources

From May 3rd to 5th, UMW’s Chief of Staff and Professor of History and American Studies Dr. Jeffrey W. McClurken ran a workshop on Collaborative Digital Liberal Arts Pedagogy: Integrating Projects and Methodologies into Your Course at DHI-B (Digital Humanities Institute — Beirut) held at the American University of Beirut. The participant group of 25 faculty, librarians, and instructional technologists came from AUB or other AMICAL schools with the goal of collaborating on using Digital Humanities tools in a course, in particular in the undergraduate context of international liberal arts institutions. Participants brought syllabi (or at least the idea for a syllabus) and left with clear plans to integrate digital projects and/or methodologies into their courses.

Harris Comments in Los Angeles Times on Housing Development in Ukraine

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Associate Professor of History and American Studies Steven Harris

Associate Professor of History and American Studies Steven Harris

Associate Professor of History and American Studies Steven Harris was quoted in the Los Angeles Times in an article about a new housing development in a residential area of Kiev, in Ukraine. The article, entitled “Soviet housing was famously drab. This Ukraine complex is all about color,” states, “‘Scholars say housing is one realm where the Soviet Union did what the United States could not: provide cheap, reasonably decent housing for everyone.’ ‘They actually did solve the housing question,’ said Steven Harris, a historian at the University of Mary Washington and author of Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life After Stalin.”

UMW’s McClurken to Appear on With Good Reason Radio

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University of Mary Washington Chief of Staff and Professor of History and American Studies Jeff McClurken will be featured on the With Good Reason public radio show this Sunday, May 18. The episode, Reconstructing Danville, will air daily through Saturday, May 24. The show examines an 1883 Danville race riot and the ripples it sent through the […]

Al-Tikriti Publishes Article on Turkish Municipal Elections

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The Middle East Report Online (MERO) published an article by Associate Professor of Middle Eastern Studies Nabil Al-Tikriti, entitled “Turkish Voters Upset Erdogan’s Competitive Authoritarianism.” In the course of this article, Professor Al-Tikriti analyzed the political and economic dynamics driving the results of the March 31, 2019 Turkish municipal elections, which proved a major defeat for the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).

“Turkish voters sent a strong message to its long-standing ruling party and its leader on March 31, 2019 that the government’s authoritarian turn has not fully succeeded,” Al-Tikriti said. “In nationwide municipal elections, for the first time in a quarter century, the political movement largely associated with Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan lost control over both the country’s economic and political capitals, as well as numerous other districts throughout the country…” Read more.

McClurken Presents on Digital Humanities and Southern History at University of Alabama

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Professor Jeff McClurken, Department of History and American Studies.

Professor Jeff McClurken, Department of History and American Studies.

In early March, Professor of History and American Studies Jeff McClurken, who also serves as the Chief of Staff and Clerk of the Board of Visitors, was invited to present on Digital Humanities and Southern History at the University of Alabama, as well as to talk with graduate students about how to integrate digital tools into their teaching and research.

See https://cw.ua.edu/51322/news/mary-washington-professor-lectures-on-southern-history-digital-humanities/ for more.

Al-Tikriti Publishes Article on 16th Century Captives

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bookThe Turkish History Foundation [TTK: Türk Tarih Kurumu], recently published the conference proceedings from the “International Piri Reis and Turkish Maritime History Symposium” [“Uluslararası Piri Reis ve Türk Denizcilik Tarihi Sempozyumu”], which Professor of History and American Studies Nabil Al-Tikriti participated in at Istanbul in September, 2013. The title of this peer-reviewed volume is Findings in Turkish Maritime History [Türk Deniz Tarihi Bildiriler]. Al-Tikriti‘s contribution is entitled “Advocating for Release: the al-Dārānī Appeals,” and can be downloaded from this link: https://www.academia.edu/10447817/Advocating_for_Release_the_al-D%C4%81r%C4%81n%C4%AB_Appeals.
In this submission, Al-Tikriti briefly summarizes and describes two letters written in the early 16th century by individuals identified separately as Abū Bakr al-Dārānī and Taḳīyüddīn Dārānī, who may have been the same person, and were at one time prisoner(s) of the Knights of St. John in Rhodes. The first letter, in Arabic, was translated into modern Turkish by İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı in 1954, and translated into French by Nicolas Vatin in 1994. The second letter was translated from Ottoman Turkish into French in 1994 by Nicolas Vatin, who described the letter, stating that the reverse side of the paper probably contained the original Arabic letter, and that it was probably written at some point after 1516. Al-Tikriti thinks it might have been written during Bayezid II’s (d. 1512) reign, but otherwise concurs with both Uzunçarşılı’s and Vatin’s earlier analyses.

McClurken Presents on Digital Initiatives

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AAC&U

At the 100th Annual Conference of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, Jeffrey McClurken, Professor of History and American Studies and Special Assistant to the Provost for Teaching, Technology, and Innovation, co-presented as part of a panel entitled, Century America: A Multi-Campus Digital History Collaboration.  McClurken presented with Leah Tams ‘14, Professor Ellen Pearson of UNC-Asheville, and Jennifer Marks, a senior at Truman State University on Century America, an online course sponsored by COPLAC and the Teagle Foundation for 13 students from nine schools that resulted in a public digital history project about local communities during the Great War and Influenza Epidemic. See more about Fredericksburg and the other communities at Http://centuryamerica.org/

EduCon

Two days later, McClurken co-led a discussion about students and digital identity at EduCon 2.7, a conference about technology, education, and project-based learning. McClurken talked about the opportunities that UMWBlogs and Domain of One’s Own creates for students at UMW to create, refine, reflect, and expand on their presence in the digital world as students, as learners, as scholars, and as graduates. He partnered with teachers and edtech leaders from K to 12 in this conversation.

McClurken Featured on With Good Reason

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An encore presentation from the University of Mary Washington’s Open and Digital Resource Conference, moderated by Jeffrey McClurken, professor of History and American Studies, aired on the “With Good Reason” public radio program from Nov. 29 to Dec. 5.

Audio files of the full program and its companion news feature are available at  http://withgoodreasonradio.org/2014/11/the-future-of-higher-education-2/

 

Al-Tikriti Discusses Military-NGO Relations and Recent Middle Eastern Developments

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In this past month, Associate Professor of History and American Studies Nabil Al-Tikriti discussed both military-NGO relations and contemporary Middle East politics at three public forums, each invited appearances.

Prof. Nabil Al-Tikriti addresses Officer Candidates at Ft. Leonard Wood

Prof. Nabil Al-Tikriti addresses Officer Candidates at Ft. Leonard Wood

On Oct. 6, in his capacity as a member of the MSF/Doctors Without Borders USA Board of Directors, Al-Tikriti addressed U.S. Army staff at Missouri’s Fort Leonard Wood. Appearing in five meetings overall, he discussed MSF’s field relationship with the U.S. and other military counterparts, particularly in cases he had either experienced or been informed about in Somalia, Albania, Turkey, Haiti, and other locales in the Middle East and Africa. He also presented the movement’s overall goals, orientations, and decisions throughout its history. Much of the day was concerned with explaining MSF’s determination to maintain its institutional neutrality, impartiality, and independence in field operations, particularly in conflict situations. In the wake of this lengthy and fruitful exchange of views, he remains grateful for the hospitality displayed by the U.S. Army counterparts he met at Fort Leonard Wood.

On Oct. 19, Al-Tikriti presented a talk to the National Community College Peacebuilding Seminar, entitled “Things Fall Apart: Prospects for Conflict in the Middle East and Beyond.” Integrated with a working dinner, Al-Tikriti offered a presentation which combined elements of his humanitarian field experience and scholarly expertise in Middle East studies to discuss the current direction of regional conflict, as well as the role of humanitarian actors in such conflicts. His presentation was part of a community college faculty seminar entitled “Teaching about Global Conflict and Resolution,” which was hosted by Northern Virginia Community College and funded by the U.S. Institute of Peace.

On Oct. 28, Al-Tikriti offered a lecture entitled “The Iraq Crisis Today” to over 100 students at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. In the course of this presentation, Al-Tikriti surveyed the multiple legacies of U.S. foreign policy in the region, particularly the effects of the 2003 Anglo-American invasion on Iraqi and regional politics and society. This talk was sponsored by the College’s Middle Eastern Students Association, who hosted Al-Tikriti for a dinner after the lecture was completed.