Illinois State University will host Middle East scholar and
decorated career Army officer Augustus Norton on Tuesday, Sept. 5, when he
will present "Avoiding the Perfect Middle East Storm" at 7 p.m. in 130
Schroeder Hall. The lecture is free and open to the public.
Norton's talk will address the tough dilemmas facing the U.S. in the Middle
East, including the tumult in Iraq, the challenge of Iran and the rise of
militant Islamist movements across the region. He has expressed serious
concerns about the Bush administration's foreign policy. In an interview
earlier this month on National Public Radio's Fresh Air, Norton observed
that the U.S. has "established a relationship with its adversary which is
totally, totally nonproductive."
Norton retired as a Colonel and as a political science professor at the U.S.
Military Academy before going to Boston University as a professor in the
departments of International Relations and Anthropology. He is co-editor of
the Princeton University Press Muslim Politics series and is a contributing
editor to Current History. His many publications on Lebanon include Amal and
the Shi'a and Hizballah of Lebanon, and his new book on Hizballah and Shi'i
politics in Lebanon is forthcoming from the Princeton University Press.
Among his latest publications are "Pity the Nation," in The Nation and
"Ritual, Blood, and Shiite Identity: 'Ashura in Nabatiyya," in The Drama
Review.
In the 1990s, Norton headed the Ford Foundation-funded Civil Society in the
Middle East program at New York University and was a Fulbright Senior
Research Fellow in Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon. A member of the Council on
Foreign Relations, he heads a multi-year project on Muslims in the West,
based at Boston University. Norton has been selected as a Fulbright Senior
Research Fellow for 2006-07 in Egypt, Kuwait and Bangladesh.
A recipient of the Legion of Merit and the Purple Heart, Norton served 12
years on the West Point faculty, two years in combat in Vietnam and fourteen
months in 1980-81 as an unarmed observer in southern Lebanon, where he was
present at the rejuvenation of Shi'i politics. Recently he accepted a
position as an advisor to the Iraq Study Group, which is mandated by the
U.S. Congress to take a fresh look at the U.S. position in Iraq. The group
is co-chaired by former Secretary of State James F. Baker and former
Congressman Lee Hamilton.
Norton's talk is co-sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences, the
Office of the Provost, the Sage Fund, and the departments of English,
History, Politics and Government and Sociology and Anthropology.
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