For Immediate Release:  March 14, 2006
Contact: Marsha Nishi Mullan     
610-328-8535   
http://www.swarthmore.edu/news/    

Middle East Expert to Speak at Swarthmore College
on International Humanitarian Laws and 'Wars on Terror'

Lisa Hajjar, associate professor in the Law and Society Program at the University of California-Santa Barbara, will speak at Swarthmore College on Friday, March 17, on "International Humanitarian Laws and 'Wars on Terror.'"  Her talk at 4:30 p.m. in the Science Center, Room 101, is free and open to the public.

Hajjar, who taught at Swarthmore from 1995 to 1999, is the author of Courting Conflict:  The Israeli Military Court System in the West Bank and Gaza (University of California Press, 2005), which is based on many months of ethnography in the field, including interviews with judges, prosecutors, defense lawyers, defendants, and translators about their experiences with these military courts.  She is also an editor of Middle East Report, published by the Middle East Research and Information Project, a non-governmental, non-profit organization in Washington, D.C.  She has also written on other topics related to the Middle East, the war on terror, torture and international law both in scholarly journals and for general periodicals such as The Nation.

The lecture is sponsored by the Interpretation Theory Program and its seminar, "Interpretation Theory:  Violence, Terror and the Media."