SFS-Qatar Faculty 2007-2008
The Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar curriculum is taught by faculty from the Georgetown University Main Campus as well as faculty brought specifically to the School of Foreign Service in Qatar.
Please refer to the Office of the Faculty Staff Contact Information for Staff and Teaching Assistants.
The following are faculty that will be teaching at the Qatar campus in the 2007 - 2008 academic year.
Dr. Lilian A. Barria
Dr. Lilian A. Barria is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar and an Assistant Professor at Eastern Illinois University. She received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Missouri-Columbia. Her research interests focus on international law and human rights. She is the Vice President of the Human Rights Section of the American Political Science Association. She has a co-authored book entitled Designing Criminal Tribunals: Sovereignty and International Concerns in the Protection of Human Rights, and her articles have appeared in journals including Human Rights Review, The International Journal of Human Rights and The Journal of Conflict Resolution.
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Dr. Aspen Brinton
Dr. Aspen Brinton is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the School of Foreign Service in Qatar at Georgetown University. After receiving her Bachelor's degree in History from Amherst College, she received both a Master's in German and European Studies and a Ph.D. in Government from Georgetown University. Her research is in the field of political theory, including the history of political thought, democratic theory, and theories of civil society. to top
Dr. Adhip Chaudhuri
Adhip Chaudhuri received his PhD from
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Dr. Brendan L. Hill
Dr. Hill earned his Bachelors of Arts degree in philosophy from the University of Hawaii at Manoa and his doctorate in European history from Georgetown University. He specializes in church and legal history, and his research focuses specifically on the criminalization of sin and the creation of a godly society at the dawn of the modern era in England.
Dr. Hill has been teaching at Georgetown University's campus in Washington, DC since 1996. In addition to teaching survey courses on the history of Europe, England & Ireland, he teaches smaller seminars on the cultural roots of ethnic conflict -- using Northern Ireland as a case study -- and on the evolving relationship between the secular and the sacred in modern Europe.
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Dr. Mehran Kamrava
Mehran Kamrava is Director of the Center for International and Regional Studies at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Qatar and is also Professor of Political Science at California State University, Northridge. His specialties include comparative politics, political development, and Middle Eastern politics. He is the author of a number of journal articles and books, including The Modern Middle East: A Political History since the First World War, which was published by the University of California Press in 2005, and The New Voices of Islam: Rethinking Politics and Modernity, also published by the University of California Press, which he edited in 2006. He has just completed work on a book manuscript on intellectual discourses in post-Khomeini Iran, and he is also co-editing a two-volume encyclopedia entitled Iran Today: Life in the Islamic Republic.
Dr. Patrick Laude
Dr. Laude has been on the SFS/Q faculty since August 2006. He is Professor in the French Department at Georgetown University. A former fellow of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, he earned a Master’s degree in philosophy from the University of Paris IV Sorbonne with certificates in Islamic and Indian philosophy.
Professor Laude's scholarly and personal interests lie in the relationship between poetry and contemplative or mystical traditions, as well as in Western representations and interpretations of Islam and Asian religions. He is currently working on a book on Islamic spirituality in 20th century French thought, and its relevance in the Islamic world. He is the author of nine books, including Pray Without Ceasing: The Way of the Invocation in World Religion, 2006, Divine Play, Sacred Laughter and Spiritual Understanding, 2005, Singing the Way: Insights in Poetry and Spiritual Transformation, 2005, Frithjof Schuon (1907-1998): Life and Teachings, 2004, Massignon intérieur, 2001, and Approches du quiétisme, 1992.
He is a regular contributor to Parabola: The Search for Meaning in New York, and he has authored numerous articles on comparative mysticism and poetry in academic journals such as Sophia: The International Journal for Philosophy of the Religion, Metaphysical Theology and Ethics, Symposium, Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques, Neophilologus, Revue théologique de Louvain and Littératures classiques.
More information is available at Professor Laude's Website.
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Dr. Leo Lefebure
Leo Lefebure is the Matteo Ricci, S.J., Professor of Theology at Georgetown University and is a Roman Catholic priest of the Archdiocese of Chicago. He is the author of four books, including The Buddha and the Christ and Revelation, the Religions, and Violence. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies and is an advisor to Monastic Interreligious Dialogue. He is a former member of the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic Dialogues of Catholics and Muslims and a current member of the Georgetown University Muslim-Catholic Dialogue. He is also an associate editor of Chicago Studies and editor-at-large for The Christian Century.
Dr. Patrick Meadows
Dr. Meadows is Visiting Associate Professor of French at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar. After obtaining a B.A. in both French literature and English literature from the University of California at Santa Cruz, he studied at Princeton University where he earned an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures. He has taught at the University of Paris IV - Sorbonne, Hamilton College in New York, and Indiana University, Bloomington. His research interests include French literature and its relationship with philosophy and symbolism, and Francophone literature. His publications include Francis Ponge and the Nature of Things: From Ancient Atomism to a Modern Poetics (London: Associated University Presses), and he is one of the authors of Littératures de la péninsule indochinoise (Paris: AUPELF) . He has also published research articles in various journals, including Symposium, The Romanic Review, and The French Review. He is also a co-author of a bilingual (French/English) language-instruction book, Chit Chat (Paris: Belin).
Joshua Mitchell
Dr. Mitchell is currently professor of political theory. He has been Chairman of the Government Department and also Associate Dean of Faculty Affairs at SFS-Q. His research interest lies in the relationship between political thought and theology in the West. He has published articles in The Review of Politics, The Journal of Politics, The Journal of Religion, APSR, and Political Theory. In 1993 his book, Not by Reason Alone: Religion, History, and Identity in Early Modern Political Thought, was published by the University of Chicago Press. A second book, The Fragility of Freedom: Tocqueville on Religion, Democracy, and American Future, was published in 1995, also by the University of Chicago Press. Dr. Mitchell most recent book, Plato's Fable: On the Mortal Condition in Shadowy Times, was published by Princeton University Press in 2006. He is currently working on two book manuscripts, Tocqueville in Arabia, and Reinhold Niebuhr and the Politics of Hope.
Mr. Yehia Mohamed
Yehia A. Mohamed earned his BA and MA in Semitic Linguistics from Cairo University- Egypt. Currently, He is a PhD Candidate (ABD) in Arabic and Amharic Languages at the same university at the Institute for African Research and Studies. Mohamed has served as a lecturer in Arabic programs at the Washington campus of Georgetown University, the Middle East Institute, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Maryland, and George Washington University. In addition, he participated in various projects at Multilingual Solutions and the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) also based in Washington DC.
His research interests include phonology, Afro-Asiatic linguistics, applied linguistics, and teaching Arabic as a foreign language. His experience includes familiarity with ACTFL proficiency testing, teaching all Arabic proficiency levels in courses for conversation, media, literature, and Islamic culture, and material development.
Dr. Lisa Nanney
Dr. Nanney earned her B.A. and PhD. degrees at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with focuses on twentieth-century literature and American Studies. Before joining the faculty of the Georgetown School of Foreign Service-Qatar in 2006 as an Associate Professor of English, she held faculty positions in English at Emory University, at the Georgetown University main campus, and in the University of North Carolina system. During a Fulbright appointment to Spain in 1990-91, she taught English and American Studies at the University of Valencia. Research and teaching interests include relationships between the modernist novel and the visual arts, the role of the environment and landscape in American literature, and women’s writing in the American South. She has published and lectured in the U.S. and Europe about writers such as Nathanael West, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, about cultural products of the Federal Writer’s Project in the 1930s, and about connections between politics and visual art in the work of writers and painters such as John Dos Passos and Fernand Leger. Current projects concern the politics and writers involved in the production of the Spanish Civil War documentary The Spanish Earth. Her critical biography John Dos Passos Revisited was published in 1998 by Twayne/Macmillan Press.
Dr. George O'Brien
George O’Brien was born in Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford, Ireland in 1945, and reared in Lismore, Co. Waterford, Ireland. He was educated at Ruskin College, Oxford and at the University of Warwick. His publications include the memoirs The Village of Longing (1987), Dancehall Days (1988) and Out of Our Minds (1994). He has also written two books on the contemporary Irish playwright, Brian Friel and numerous critical articles on a wide variety of issues pertaining to nineteenth and twentieth century Irish literature. He has taught at the University of Warwick, Vassar College, Trinity College, Dublin, and the University of Lisbon. He is currently Professor of English at Georgetown.
Patricia O'Connor
Patricia O'Connor is an Associate Professor of English. Her current research focuses on narratives of addiction. She also researches prisoners' narratives and a grammar of agency; functions of story; Appalachian narratives; teaching writing; prison teaching; literacy struggles.
O'Connor earned her Ph.D. in Linguistics from Georgetown University, M.A.in English from Georgetown University and B.A. in Secondary Education with specializations in teaching English and French from Marshall University.
In 2005 Prof. O'Connor received the Mitsubishi Unsung Hero Award for her community service work in addiction. In 2004 Professor O'connor co-edited a special volume on outreach into prisons: Reflections--Prison Literacies, Narratives and Community Connections.
Other O'Connor publications include: Speaking of Crime (2000), Literacy Behind Prison Walls (1994) (with Karl O. Haigler, Caroline W. Harlow, and Anne Campbell); and articles on narrative strategies and discourses of violence in a variety of journals including: The Journal of African American Men; Discourse & Society; Text; Pragmatics; Pre/Text.
O'Connor is a founding member of the national service-learning organization--Educators for Community Engagement, a senior research fellow in the GU Center for Social Justice. She also has published articles on service learning in NSEE Quarterly, Public Outreach, and in Watters and Ford Writing for Change.
Dr. Ibrahim M. Oweiss 
Dr. Oweiss joined the faculty of the Department of Economics at Georgetown University in 1967 after having served on the faculty of the University of Minnesota and Western Maryland College. He was also a visiting professor of economics at Harvard University and taught at Johns Hopkins University. While on leave from Georgetown University, he was appointed in the Egyptian Cabinet as First Under-Secretary for Economic Affairs in August 1977 and, with rank of Ambassador, he held the position of the Chief of the Egyptian Economic Mission to the United States headquartered in New York. Among the positions he held prior to his departure to the United States was the Director of the Department of Industrial Projects in Cairo.
As an international economic advisor, he worked for several governments and multinational corporations in the USA and abroad. Dr. Oweiss was one of the founding members of Georgetown University Center for Contemporary Arab Studies as well as the College of Commerce and Economics at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman. Dr. Oweiss has authored over fifty scholarly publications including: Petrodollar Surpluses, Arab Civilization, The Political Economy of Contemporary Egypt. In a pioneering work on oil revenues, he coined the term "Petrodollars". The "Oweiss Demand Curve" was first presented at Oxford University.
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Ms. Candith Pallandre 
Ms. Pallandre has been a Senior Instructor in the English as a Foreign Language Department at Georgetown since 1996. She has been Curriculum Coordinator, instructor of all levels of language courses, and has done teacher training on both short and long-term assignments in Chile and Korea. She has presented at International TESOL Conferences on issues related to academic reading and writing skills in second-language learning, as well as on incorporating technology into the learning process.
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Dr. Victoria Pedrick
Dr. Victoria Pedrick is the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and also an associate professor of Classics at Georgetown University. She received her PhD in Classics from the University of Cincinnati and has taught in the College of Georgetown University for many years. She teaches reading courses in both Greek and Roman authors as well as courses on ancient myth, on archaic epic, and on aspects of daily life such the lives of women and children. Her research specialties include the Homeric epics, Greek tragedy and fifth-century Athenian culture; she has written articles on both the Iliad and Odyssey as well as on Sophocles and Catullus. She recently co-edited The Soul of Tragedy: Essays on Athenian Drama; her book Euripides, Freud and the Romance of Belonging appeared from The Johns Hopkins University Press in 2007.
Dr. James Reardon-Anderson 
James Reardon-Anderson is Sun Yat-sen Professor of Chinese Studies and dean of the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service (SFS) in Qatar. He has been a member of the Georgetown faculty since 1985, and has served as director of the Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies in Taipei (1980-81, 1988), chief librarian of the C.V. Starr East Asian Library of Columbia University (1982-85), director of the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People's Republic of China (1990-92); director of Asian Studies at Georgetown (1992-1995); and director of the Master of Science in Foreign Service program (2002-05). Dean Reardon-Anderson is the author of five books on the history and politics of China, most recently Reluctant Pioneers: China’s Expansion Northward, 1644-1937 (Stanford University Press, 2005), a study of Chinese frontier expansion and settlement.
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Dr. Sampsell-Willmann, a U.S. intellectual and social historian, received her Ph.D. (with distinction) from Georgetown University in 2002, her J.D. from the University of Baltimore School of Law in 1991, and her B.A. (Summa Cum Laude) from McDaniel College (formerly Western Maryland College) in 1987. She is the author of If I Could Tell This Story in Words . . . : Lewis W. Hine and the Intellectual History of Social Documentary forthcoming from The University of North Carolina Press. She is also the author of Three Generations of Grass’: Photography, Liberalism, and the American Yeoman,” History of Photography (Dec. 2003). Her next academic project will examine cultural agitation for African American civil rights in 1930s America. Dr. Sampsell-Willmann is a fine art photographer, a wordsmith, a student pilot, a whitewater canoeist, a scuba diver, an avid traveler, a collector of ideas, and an appreciator of gustatory delights. Dr. Sampsell-Willmann teaches in the full range of American history and approaches every academic subject as an interdisciplinary exercise. Her areas of particular interest include environmental history, art and ideas, dissent, and the history of slavery.
Dr. Ganesh Seshan
Dr. Seshan is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Economics, having joined the Georgetown School of Foreign Service in Qatar after working at the World Bank in the Middle East North Africa division. He earned his M.A and Ph.D in Economics from the University of Virginia where he also taught economics. His dissertation work examined the impact of trade liberalization on household welfare in Vietnam. Dr. Seshan’s research interests are in international economics and development economics. His working papers include The Impact of Trade Liberalization on Household Welfare in a Developing Country with Imperfect Labor Markets, Labor Responses to Trade Liberalization in a Rural Economy and Assessing the Potential Fiscal and Social Effects of a Nominal Exchange Rate Devaluation in a Low-Income African Country. Among the issues he worked on while at the World Bank include the prospects of economic integration in trade and investment among Maghreb countries, determinants of private investment in Tunisia and measures of governance in the MENA region. Dr. Seshan has also presented his work at the Midwest International Economics conference and the Northeast Universities Development Consortium Conference (NEUDC).
More information is available on Dr. Seshan's website.
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Joe Sitterson
Joseph Sitterson is Professor and former Chair of the Department of English. His particular areas of research interest include British Romantic literature, literary theory, the epic, and biblical interpretation. Sitterson earned his Ph.D. and B.A. from the University of
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Dr. Amira El-Azhary Sonbol 
Dr. Sonbol is Professor of Islamic History, Law, and Society. She specializes in women, gender and Islam and is the author of several books including The New Mamluks, Women, Family Law and Divorce in Islamic History; The Creation of a Medical Profession in Egypt: 1800-1922; and The Memoirs of Abbas Hilmi II: Sovereign of Egypt. Professor Sonbol is co-editor of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, a quarterly journal co-published with Selly Oak Colleges (UK). She teaches courses on the History of Modern Egypt, Women and Law, and Islamic Civilization.
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Dr. Gary Wasserman
Dr. Wasserman is a Visiting Professor of Government. He has been a Visiting Professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies teaching graduate students about American government, media, and political parties in Nanjing, China. As a Fulbright Scholar, he studied at St. Antony's College, Oxford University, Nairobi University, and Georgetown's School of Foreign Service. His thesis, Politics of Decolonization, was published by Cambridge University Press. He has taught at Columbia, Medgar Evers College CUNY, and George Mason universities.
As a Senior Vice President of the public affairs firm Bozell Sawyer Miller, Dr. Wasserman organized and shaped state and local campaigns, a role he had also filled while a partner in a grassroots Washington firm. His public service includes: National Issues Coordinator for a presidential campaign; legislative assistant in the House of Representatives, and Special Assistant for Evaluation to the Administrator of USAID. At present he advises the U.S. Agency for International Development, has spoken in several countries under the U.S. Speakers Program and created Banyan Advisors, a non-profit lobbying firm for the poor.
Dr. Wasserman has written for The New York Times, Foreign Policy, and Political Science Quarterly. With Senator Fred Harris he co-authored America's Government and wrote a biography, The Founding Family (2002). He has just finished Politics in Action, a book of case studies on American politics for Houghton Mifflin (2006), and the latest edition of his best–selling text for Longman, The Basics of American Politics, (2006) 12th edition.
Clare E Wilde
Clare Wilde joined the faculty of SFS-Qatar in Spring 2008 and is teaching courses on Theology.
Abbas Al-Tonsi
Abbas Al-Tonsi is a faculty member at the Arabic Language Institute (ALI) at the American University in Cairo (AUC) Since 1984. .He has authored or co-authored a number of Arabic textbooks including Al-Kitaab with Kristen Brustad and Mahmoud Al-Batal, cArabiyyat Wasaa’il al-iclaam (Media Arabic) with Nariman Warraki, An Intensive Course in Egyptian Colloquial Arabic with Layla Al-Sawi, Egyptian colloquial A Structure review, and An Advanced Reader in Egyptian Colloquial with Kristen Brustad. He has written many articles in literary criticism, Arabic Media, and Politics. He is now working on three new Arabic textbooks
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Elizabeth Zelensky
Dr. Elizabeth Kristofovich Zelensky received a PhD from Georgetown University in 1993, in Russian History and European Studies. Cultural history-specifically the semiotics of change - lies at the center of her professional interests. Her dissertation, and forthcoming book: Sophia: Holy Wisdom and the Praxis of Empire concerns changes in the imagery of the late-seventeenth-century Russian monarchy under the impact of Westernization. She has also published on Russian childhood, Orthodox monasticism and the Russian revolution of 1917.
Dr Zelensky has been employed at Georgetown University since 1997 in the capacity of Visiting Assistant Professor. She has taught courses in European Civilization, Russian History , History of Childhood in the West, and Women and Power(Gender and Politics). She has also taught at American University in Washington, DC and George Mason University in Virginia.
Dr. Zelensky’s work as a historian has not been confined to the world of academe. She has also worked as a historian in the public sector: she was a historical consultant at the US Department of Justice, Office of Special Investigations from 1998-2000, investigating war crimes in Eastern Europe and the former USSR during World War II. She was appointed Ukrainian Area Studies Chair at the National Foreign Service Training Center, U.S. Department of State from 1998-2001.
A recipient of a Fullbright-Hays Dissertation Research Abroad Grant,(Rome and Helsinki) , and a National Endowment for the Humanities –ACTR/ACCELS Collaborative Research Grant for studying “Ethnicity as a Component of Childhood: Russophone Children in Independent Ukraine”(Kyiv and Lutsk) , she has also been granted several Short Term Study Grants from the International Research and Exchange Board(IREX) for study in Russia.
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Events Calendar
Upcoming SFS-Qatar Events
- Aug 24, 6pm-8pm: Distinguished Lecture Series: Rami Khoury
- Oct 14, 6pm-8pm: Faculty Distinguished Lecture: Seyyed Hossein Nasr
SFS-Qatar News
- SFS-Qatar Shares Global Classroom with Japanese Universities
Georgetown University and Polycom® Japan collaborated in live demonstrations of the Georgetown University Global Classroom as an educational video conferencing tool to universities and suppliers in Tokyo. (July 01, 2008) - Scholars discuss the Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy
John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt explain how the US Foreign Policy does not reflect the best interests of the US, Israel, and other Middle Eastern countries (June 23, 2008) - Summer Classes have Concluded at Georgetown's Qatar Campus
Students from SFS-Qatar and other Education City universities took elective courses over summer. (June 10, 2008)
