U.S. Foreign Policy and the Modern Middle East

The US and Iraq

September 15, 2010 / New Brunswick, NJ

Eric Davis

Eric Davis is a Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University and past director of the University's Center for Middle Eastern Studies. He has been appointed a fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University; the Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin; the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton University; the Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture, Rutgers University; and the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis. Dr. Davis was appointed a Carnegie Scholar for 2007-2008 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York to conduct research for a project entitled, "Islam and the Formation of Political Identities in Post-Bacthist Iraq: Implications for a Democratic Transition." He also holds a fellowship from the American Academic Research Institute in Iraq (TAARII) and a grant from the United States Institute of Peace to study the relationship between sectarian identities and civil society building in Iraq. Dr. Davis is a member of an eight nation study, "Democracy and Development in the Arab World," being conducted under the auspices of the World Bank and the American University in Beirut. His publications include Memories of State: Politics, History and Collective Identity in Modern Iraq (California, 2005); Challenging Colonialism: Bank Misr and Egyptian Industrialization, 1920-1941 (Princeton, 1983) (Arabic translation: Institute for Arab Development, 1986); and Statecraft in the Middle East: Oil, Historical Memory and Popular Culture (with Nicolas Gavrielides, Florida, 1991). He is currently finishing a book on Post-Baathist Iraq, Taking Democracy Seriously in Iraq, which is under contract with Cambridge University Press. Dr. Davis received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

This essay is based on a lecture for a two-day History Institute for Teachers sponsored by FPRI's Wachman Center in cooperation with the American Institute for History Education on U.S. Foreign Policy and the Modern Middle East.

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