Mednicoff receives Fulbright to teach and study in Qatar
David M. Mednicoff, assistant professor in the Center for Public Policy and Administration and the Department of Legal Studies, will spend the 2006-07 academic year in Doha, Qatar under a research and teaching grant from the Fulbright Scholars program. He will conduct research for a book on links between law and political change in the Arab world and lecturing on international politics, international law and U.S. foreign policy at the University of Qatar.
Mednicoff has also been awarded a $15,000 grant from the American Institute of Maghrebi (North African) Studies to conduct research on the interconnection of the rule of law and Arab societies. The grant funds field work in Tunisia during the academic year 2006-07.
Mednicoff is a frequent commentator in the media on issues related to politics in the Middle East, the Arab-Israeli conflict, globalization and international terrorism. He is the first-ever American Fulbright scholar to Qatar in the field of international politics, and the first non-Muslim to receive a grant there related to law. Qatar is home to the well-known Arab TV network al-Jazeera and site for the 2006 Asian Games.
“Qatar is an Arab country undergoing an extraordinary amount of political and educational change. It is a most interesting place to study, because of its recent success at combining its Islamic legal and religious identity with socioeconomic and media development,” Mednicoff says. “Given the challenges facing Arab-American relations, it is a tremendous privilege for me to link my own research agenda with the opportunity to contribute to the Fulbright program’s core mission to foster intellectual, cross-cultural exchange. I hope that the chance the Fulbright will give me to be among the very first Americans to teach international law and politics to Qatari university students will have an enduring effect on my pedagogy in general and my specific aspiration to convey diverse perspectives on the contemporary Middle East and Islam to the UMass community.”
In 2004, Mednicoff was one of four educators to earn a national award for innovative methods of teaching about the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in a national competition sponsored by Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., and the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. In 2002, he developed “Explaining Terror: The Middle East and the U.S.,” an interdisciplinary course designed to engage students with the global issues surrounding the terrorist attacks. Mednicoff has taught the course since then, adjusting its contents to reflect new developments in the “war on terror” while preserving its core goal of giving students the tools they need to ask their own questions and reach their own conclusions about terrorism and U.S. policies toward the Middle East.
Mednicoff is a Massachusetts native who earned a bachelor’s degree from Princeton and dual graduate degrees from Harvard in law and political science. He joined the faculty in 1999. He is also an adjunct professor in Judaic and Near Eastern Studies and is affiliated with the Five College program in Middle Eastern studies. Mednicoff is a former Fulbright scholar to Morocco, has been a lawyer in Egypt and speaks six languages, including Arabic and Hebrew.
June 1, 2006.
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