A Fall 2006 lecture series goes live. The first speaker, Rutgers political scientist Eric Davis, charts a path towards democracy in Iraq.

In this Oct. 5, 2006, lecture now available as a podcast, Professor Eric Davis of Rutgers University expands on the ideas in a September 2006 op-ed in the Newark Star-Ledger, "In Iraq, Democracy Is the Only Answer." Davis's lecture was the first in a series at UCLA on "The New Middle East: Five Years After 9/11," sponsored by the Center for Near Eastern Studies.

CNES will be adding podcasts from this series (scroll down) and other events to a new web page, which has instructions for subscribing to podcasts with iTunes software. With commonly installed computer applications, desktop users may listen to the lectures simply by clicking on the podcast links, such as the ones in this article. 

Earlier this year, the UCLA Center for World Languages launched two series of podcasts in Russian. The Center for Chinese Studies has posted a podcast of a June lecture by UC-Berkeley sociologist Thomas Gold.

Davis is a Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University. His research has involved the relationship between state power and historical memory in modern Iraq, the political economy of Egyptian industrialization as a case study of dependency theory, the impact of oil wealth on the state and culture in Arab oil-producing countries, the ideology and social bases of Islamic radical movements, and the comparison of Islamic and Jewish radical movements. His books include Memories of State: Politics, History and Collective Identity in Modern Iraq (California, 2004); Statecraft in the Middle East: Oil, Historical Memory and Popular Culture, with Nicolas Gavrielides (Florida, 1991); and Challenging Colonialism: Bank Misr and Egyptian Industrialization, 1920-1941 (Princeton, 1983). He is currently working on a two-volume study of American Orientalism entitled Mapping America's Orient: The Middle East in American Political and Popular Culture, 1750-1914, 1914-2003.

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Duration: 1:12:36