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Contribution to the Development of Nations 2013

Dr. Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab

Lebanon

Elizabeth Kassab studied business administration and philosophy at the American University of Beirut (AUB), and continued her graduate studies in philosophy at Switzerland’s Fribourg University. She spent three years as a post-doctorate fellow at Germany’s University of Bielefeld before returning to Beirut in 1991 to teach in AUB’s the philosophy department and later at Balamand University. In 1999 she was awarded a Fulbright fellowship to work on her research project at New York’s New School University. Later she became Visiting Scholar at Columbia University and a Visiting Associate Professor at the Yale Center for International and Area Studies. Since 2012 Kassab has been a Mellon Visiting Professor at the Cogut Center for the Humanities of Brown University in the USA.

About The Book

This book explores approaches to questions of cultural malaise in the Arab world, questions the relationship between cultural crisis and politics in intellectual debate, and endeavours to compare these approaches and debate to related conversations in other postcolonial regions. The book was judged as a work of intellectual history that understands the process of ‘cultural decolonisation’ within the Arab context accomplished through the survey and analysis of major trends and thinkers, and through the application of a comparative perspective that brings the Arab world into conversation with Africa, the United States, Europe, and Latin America.

Published: 2012