Wednesday January 11, 4:30 PM, Filene Auditorium, Moore Hall

"What Killed Middle East Liberalism?"

Timur Kuran (Duke University)

Dirk Vandewalle (Dartmouth College)

Sponsored by the PEP Leadership Council (www.dartmouth.edu/pep)

Timur Kuran is Professor of Economics and Political Science, and Gorter Family
Professor of Islamic Studies at Duke University. His research focuses on (1)
social change, including the evolution of preferences and institutions, and (2)
the economic and political history and modernization of the Middle East. His
current projects include a study of the role that the Middle East's traditional
institutions played in its poor political performance, as measured by
democratization and human liberties. Among his publications are Private Truths,
Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification (Harvard
University Press); Islam and Mammon: The Economic Predicaments of Islamism
(Princeton University Press); The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back
the Middle East (Princeton University Press); and a tri-lingual edited work
that consists of ten volumes, Socio-Economic Life in Seventeenth-century
Istanbul: Glimpses from Court Records (Is Bank Publications). After graduating
from Robert Academy in Istanbul in 1973, Kuran went on to study economics at
Princeton University (AB 1977) and Stanford University (PhD 1982). Between 1982
and 2007 he taught at the University of Southern California. He was also a
member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the John Olin Visiting
Professor at the Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago, and a
visiting professor of economics at Stanford University. He currently directs
the Association for Analytic Learning about Islam and Muslim Societies
(AALIMS); is a member of the Executive Committee of the International Economic
Association; edits a book series for Cambridge University Press, serves on
numerous editorial boards; and is a member of the Turkish Academy of Sciences.
He has served on the World Economic Forum's Arab World Council.

Diederick "Dirk" Vandewalle is Associate Professor of Government at Dartmouth
College. His research focuses on Libya, political economy, Middle East
politics, commodity booms, institutional development, and economic reform in
developing countries, and state-building and regime change in the Middle East
and North Africa. He is the author of A History of Modern Libya (Cambridge
University Press) and of Libya Since Independence: Oil and State-Building
(Cornell University Press) and has written widely on the Arab Spring. He
received his B.A. from Southwest Minnesota State University and his PhD from
Columbia University.