A two-part panel presentation

1.  "The Rise and Fall of the Islamic State," James L. Gelvin, UCLA

 2.  "'This is the 74th Ferman on Us!': The Yazidis, from Ottoman Atrocities to Islamic State Genocide," Zeynep Turkyilmaz, Dartmouth College

"The Rise and Fall of the Islamic State": Although seemingly taking the world by storm, the Islamic state is more fragile than it has been portrayed.  In his talk, James L. Gelvin will discuss the origins and evolution of the Islamic State, its position as odd-man-out within the jihadist tendency, its idiosyncratic ideology, and its unpromising future.

James L. Gelvin is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He received his B.A. from Columbia University, his Master's in International Affairs from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, and his Ph.D. from Harvard University. He has taught at Boston College, Harvard University, MIT, and the American University in Beirut.  A specialist in the modern social and cultural history of the Arab East, he is author of four books: The Arab Uprisings: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2012, 2014); The Modern Middle East: A History (Oxford University Press, 2004, 2007, 2011, 2015);The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War (Cambridge University Press, 2005, 2007, 2014); and Divided Loyalties: Nationalism and Mass Politics in Syria at the Close of Empire (University of California Press, 1998), along with numerous articles and chapters in edited volumes. He is also co-editor of Global Muslims in the Age of Steam and Print, 1850-1930 (University of California Press, 2013).

Zeynep Turkyilmaz received her Ph.D. from the Department of History at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2009.  Her dissertation, "Anxieties of Conversion: Missionaries, State and Heterodox Communities in the Late Ottoman Empire," is based on intensive research conducted in Ottoman, British, and several American missionary archives. She was an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar Postdoctoral at UNC-Chapel Hill between 2009-2010 and Europe in the Middle East/ The Middle East in Europe Seminar Postdoctoral Fellow at Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin between 2010-2011. She joined the Dartmouth College as an assistant professor of history in 2011. She is currently working on her book project based on her dissertation. Her research and teaching interests include state-formation, gender, nationalism, religion with a focus on heterodoxy and missionary work in the Middle East from 1800 to the present.

Cost : free and open to the public

www.international.ucla.edu/cnes/home

Sponsor(s): Center for Near Eastern Studies