Palestine Week - Teach-in Series: From the Nakba in 1948 to the Ongoing War on Gaza…Understand and Act.

Nesrine Badawi

Associate Professor, Political Science Department

The American University in Cairo

Nesrine Badawi is an associate professor of public and international law at the Department of Political Science. She received her PhD in Law from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She holds an LLM in international and comparative law, a License en Droit and a BA in political science. Badawi has experience working with United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees on refugee law and has offered consultancy work to several organizations on humanitarian law and Islamic law. She has supervised several theses in the fields of Islamic law, international humanitarian law and international human rights law and she serves as an advisory editor at the University of Bologna Law Review.

Sean Lee

Assistant Professor, Political Science Department

The American University in Cairo

Sean Lee is an assistant professor of political science at The American University in Cairo (AUC). He received his PhD from the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University. Previously, he was a Doctoral Fellow at the Orient-Institut Beirut and a research affiliate with the Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies at the American University of Beirut. His work focuses on minority communities during times of conflict, in particular in Lebanon and Syria. He has conducted fieldwork in Lebanon, Turkey, Tunisia, Germany, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Rabab El Mahdi ’96, ’98

Associate Professor, Political Science Department

The American University in Cairo

Rabab El Mahdi is an associate professor of political science at The American University in Cairo (AUC). She earned her PhD from McGill University in Montreal, where she wrote her dissertation on the impact of neo-liberal economic reconstruction on changing patterns of state-civil society relations in Egypt and Bolivia. Her field of specialization is comparative political economy and development, with a focus on Latin America and the Middle East. El Mahdi’s research interests cover the areas of state-civil society relations, social movements and resistance, as well as the political economy of social policy. Before joining AUC, she worked for several developmental organizations, including Non-governmental organizations and United Nation agencies. Previously she taught at Yale University and was a recipient of a number of fellowships at Columbia University, the University of Chicago, and the Rockefeller Bellagio Center Residency. She is also the recipient of a number of research grants from Carnegie Corporation of New York and The Rockefeller Brothers Foundation. Currently, she leads AUC's research project, Alternative Policy Solutions (APS). She serves on the boards of a number of civil society and professional organizations, including the Arab Political Science Network (APSN).

Steven Salaita

Professor, Department of English and Comparative Literature

The American University in Cairo

Steven Salaita is the author of eight books and is currently finishing a memoir about leaving and returning to academe. His book An Honest Living is to be published by Fordham University Press.