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CMES is pleased to present the 2016 Hilda B. Silverman Memorial Lecturer
Irene Gendzier
Professor Emerita, Department of Political Science, Boston University
Watch Irene Gendzier's lecture
Read Irene Gendzier's lecture
Irene L. Gendzier is Professor Emerita at Boston University, where she was a long time member of the faculty, serving in the Departments of Political Science and History, as well as being a member of the African Studies Center. She obtained her B.A. from Barnard College and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University. Professor Gendzier was a Faculty Associate at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University and is currently a CMES Affiliate in Research, a position she also holds at the Center for International Studies, MIT.
In addition to teaching at various universities prior to her appointment at Boston University, Professor Gendzier was a Visiting Professor at Oxford University’s Center for Lebanese Studies, where she worked on Lebanese archives for her seminal work, Notes From the Minefield: United States Intervention in Lebanon and the Middle East, 1945-1958. At Boston University, she taught undergraduate and graduate courses in the History Department that ranged from Introductions to the Modern Middle East and the History of North Africa to seminars in selected themes of the contemporary Middle East. In the Political Science Department, Professor Gendzier taught courses in Comparative Political Development, State and Society in the Contemporary Middle East and North Africa, advanced seminars and directed studies in International Political Economy and Development, among other subjects.
Professor Gendzier has served on the editorial and/or advisory boards of several scholarly journals including: the International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES), New Political Science (NPS), Logos, MERIP/The Middle East Report and the Gazelle Review (London). She is also a member of the American Political Science Association, Middle East Institute, Middle East Studies Association, Society for the Historians of American Foreign Relations and the Fulbright Review Board (December 1999). In addition Professor Gendzier has served on the selection committee of the Institute of International Education for Middle East and North Africa Studies and as a consultant for the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Among Professor Gendzier’s many publications are the following books and articles:
Dying to Forget: Oil, Power, Palestine, & the Foundations of U.S. Policy in the Middle East (Columbia University Press, 2015); Crimes of War, co-editor with Richard Falk and Robert J. Lifton, (The Nation Books, 2006); Notes From the Minefield: United States Intervention in Lebanon and the Middle East, 1945-1958 (Columbia University Press, 1997, 2006); Development Against Democracy: Manipulating Political Change in the Third World (Tyrone Press, 1995); Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study (Pantheon Books, 1973, Grove Press, 1985); "The Things That Count and Cannot be Counted," in Stephen Bird, Adam Silver and Joshua Yesnowitz (eds.), Agitation With a Smile: Howard Zinn's Legacies and the Future of Activism (Paradigm Publishers, 2013); "The Risk of Knowing," Works and Days, Special Issue on Academic Freedom, vols. 26/27 (2008-09); "Does Knowing Matter? US Congressional Records and the Arming of Iraq," Unbound: Harvard Journal of the Legal Left (Harvard Law School, 2008).
It is to her former students and friends who have been a constant source of inspiration and support in common struggles for social justice and the right to know, that Professor Gendzier would like to dedicate her memorial lecture in honor of Hilda B. Silverman. Hilda’s inspirational struggle and the unique voice that conveyed it evoke the words of the late Zimbabwean author and human rights activist, Chanjerai Hove: “I try to write in order to fight the decay called silence, to communicate with myself so as to search for the ‘other’ in me.”
For more on the Silverman Memorial Lecture at CMES, click here.
Contact: Liz Flanagan