This webinar, hosted by the Kurdish Political Studies Program, offers a stimulating discussion around the new edition of David McDowall's A Modern History of the Kurds, a foundational text in Kurdish studies. This edition includes novel sections on the contemporary Kurdish politics in Syria, and the role of Islam and gender dynamics in Kurdish politics.
David McDowall, the author, will make introductory remarks. David Romano, Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University, will provide his reflections on the book and the evolution of Kurdish studies before the Q&A section. Hakan Ozoglu, Professor of History at UCF, will moderate the event.
David McDowall studied Middle East history under Albert Hourani, but he has had a non-academic career successively in the British Army, the British Council, and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). He was also an Oxfam relief worker in Beirut during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon 1982. In 1984 he turned to full-time writing and has written on the Lebanon, Palestine and Britain as well as on Kurdistan.
David Romano holds the Thomas G. Strong Chair in Middle East Politics at Missouri State University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto and his M.A. and B.A. from McGill University. He is the author of The Kurdish Nationalist Movement (Cambridge University Press, 2006 -- also translated into Turkish and Persian) and the co-editor of Conflict, Democratization and the Kurdish Issue in the Middle East (Palgrave Mamillan, 2014) and The Kurds in the Middle East: Enduring Problems and New Dynamics (Lexingtoon, 2020).
Hakan Ozoglu is Professor of History at the University of Central Florida. His first book was titled Kurdish Notables and the Ottoman State. His second book, titled From Caliphate to Secular State deals with the power struggle in early Turkish Republic. His most recent book is The Decline of the Ottoman Empire and The Rise of the Turkish Republic: Observations of an American Diplomat, 1919-1927.
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