Center for International and Regional Studies

Fred H. Lawson is the 2009-2010 CIRS Senior Fellow. He is Rice Professor of Government at Mills College, where he has been teaching international relations and Middle East politics since 1985. He is author of Social Origins of Egyptian Expansionism during the Muhammad ‘Ali Period (Columbia University Press, 1992); Why Syria Goes to War (Cornell University Press, 1996); Constructing International Relations in the Arab World (Stanford University Press, 2006); and other studies of political economy and foreign policy in the Middle East. He has held Fulbright lecturerships at the University of Aleppo (1992-93) and Aden University (2001).

Attiya Ahmad is the 2009-2010 CIRS Post-Doctoral Fellow. She recently completed her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology at Duke University in the US. Based on over two years of fieldwork conducted in Kuwait, Nepal, and Pakistan, her research focuses on South Asian migrant domestic workers in Kuwait who have converted to Islam, a project that points to the importance of the household as a cosmopolitan space and site of confluence between Islamic reform and dawa movements, and the feminization of transnational labour migration that marks our contemporary period. Dr. Ahmad’s work brings together scholarship on Islamic studies, globalization, diaspora and migration studies, economic anthropology, and political economy.