Fellows

Ali Abdullatif Ahmida

Professor Ahmida, who is chair of UNE's Department of Political Science, is author of The Making of Modern Libya: State Formation, Colonization, and Resistance, 1830-1932 and Forgotten Voices: Power and Agency in Colonial and Postcolonial Libya. He also edited Beyond Colonialism and Nationalism in the Maghrib: History, Culture and Politics and Bridges Across the Sahara: Social, Economic and Cultural Impact of the Trans-Sahara Trade during the 19th and 20th Centuries.

Ahmida has lectured in a variety of U.S., Canadian, European and African universities and colleges, and has contributed several articles, book reviews, and chapters to books on the African state, identity and alienation, class and state formation in modern Libya.

He has also been called upon to advise the United Nations Security Council on issues related to North Africa.

Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky was born on December 7, 1928 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His undergraduate and graduate years were spent at the University of Pennsylvania where he received his PhD in linguistics in 1955. During the years 1951 to 1955, Chomsky was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard University Society of Fellows. While a Junior Fellow he completed his doctoral dissertation entitled, "Transformational Analysis." The major theoretical viewpoints of the dissertation appeared in the monograph Syntactic Structure, which was published in 1957. This formed part of a more extensive work, The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory, circulated in mimeograph in 1955 and published in 1975.

Chomsky joined the staff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1955 and in 1961 was appointed full professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics (now the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.) From 1966 to 1976 he held the Ferrari P. Ward Professorship of Modern Languages and Linguistics. In 1976 he was appointed Institute Professor.

During the years 1958 to 1959 Chomsky was in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, NJ. In the spring of 1969 he delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford; in January 1970 he delivered the Bertrand Russell Memorial Lecture at Cambridge University; in 1972, the Nehru Memorial Lecture in New Delhi, and in 1977, the Huizinga Lecture in Leiden, among many others.

Professor Chomsky has received honorary degrees from Bologna University, Ljubljana University, University of Florence, University of Athens, University of London, University of Chicago, Loyola University of Chicago, Swarthmore College, Delhi University, Bard College, University of Massachusetts, University of Pennsylvania, Georgetown University, Amherst College, Cambridge University, University of Buenos Aires, McGill University, Universitat Rovira I Virgili, Tarragona, Columbia University, University of Connecticut, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Univ. of Western Ontario, University of Toronto, Harvard University, University of Calcutta, National Tsing Hua University, Universidad Nacional del Comahur (Argentina), Universidad Nacional De Colombia, Free University of Brussels, and Central Connecticut State Univ. He is a member of the American Philosophical Society, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Science, and a Foreign Member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. In addition, he is a member of other professional and learned societies in the U.S. and abroad, and is a recipient of the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association, the Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences, the Helmholtz Medal, the Dorothy Eldridge Peacemaker Award, the Ben Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science, The Adela Dwyer/St. Thomas of Villanova Peace Award, and others.

Chomsky has written and lectured widely on linguistics, philosophy, intellectual history, contemporary issues, international affairs and U.S. foreign policy. His works include: Aspects of the Theory of Syntax; Cartesian Linguistics; Sound Pattern of English (with Morris Halle); Language and Mind; American Power and the New Mandarins; At War with Asia; For Reasons of State; Peace in the Middle East?; Reflections on Language; The Political Economy of Human Rights, Vol. I and II (with E.S. Herman); Rules and Representations; Lectures on Government and Binding; Towards a New Cold War; Radical Priorities; Fateful Triangle; Knowledge of Language; Turning the Tide; Pirates and Emperors; On Power and Ideology; Language and Problems of Knowledge; The Culture of Terrorism; Manufacturing Consent (with E.S. Herman); Necessary Illusions; Deterring Democracy; Year 501; Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War and US Political Culture; Letters from Lexington; World Orders, Old and New; The Minimalist Program; Powers and Prospects; The Common Good; Profit Over People; The New Military Humanism; New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind; Rogue States; A New Generation Draws the Line; 9-11; Understanding Power; On Nature and Language; Pirates and Emperors, Old and New; Chomsky on Democracy and Education; Middle East Illusions; Hegemony or Survival; Imperial Ambitions; Failed States; Perilous Power; Interventions; Inside Lebanon; What We Say Goes: Conversations on U.S. Power in a Changing World; The Essential Chomsky; Hopes and Prospects; and Gaza in Crisis.   (Rev 12/2010)

Dan Cohen

Professor Dan Cohen has taught Philosophy at universities on three different continents, published in journals on four continents, and lectured on a total of five (and counting). But even though the path of his philosophical career has taken him literally around the world, it began, it has flourished, and, if he has his  way, it will end here in Maine.   

Professor Cohen cannot claim to be a Mainer, having been born through no fault of his own in NYC, but he made it here as soon as he could.  He was introduced to Plato and Aristotle, Descartes and Spinoza, Hume and Kant, and the immensely compelling but even more exasperating Ludwig Wittgenstein as an under-graduate at Colby College in the 1970s, but he did not understand that they were to be lifelong partners-in-conversation until he found that their voices were constant companions with him during one particular walk he took in the woods.  It was, however, a very long walk: after he graduated from Colby, he went down to Springer Mountain in Georgia and spent the next five months contemplating Being and Non-Being while hiking the Appalachian Trail back to Maine – and realizing that he really would have to pursue graduate studies and a career in Philosophy.

Professor Cohen did his graduate work at Indiana University, writing a dissertation on the formal logic of conditionals.  By a stroke of immense good fortune, a position opened up at Colby as he was finishing his Ph.D. and was offered the job.  Since returning to Maine he has written a book on arguments and metaphors in Philosophy and has published regularly in the top journals in the field. He has also assumed positions of responsibility within the academic community, serving as the Book Review Editor for the Canadian journal Informal Logic, as a member of the Advisory Board for the Chilean journal Cogency, and as a referee for journals from as far away as South Africa, the Netherlands, and Australia.  Closer to home, he is on the Executive Board of the Association for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking.

Professor Cohen's philosophical interests began, befitting the mathematics major that he was, with formal logic.  They have since broadened to include epistemology, philosophy of language, and argumentation theory.  With Wittgenstein’s voice following him every step of the way.

Patricia Limerick

Patty Limerick is the Faculty Director and Chair of the Board of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado, where she is also a Professor of History. Limerick has dedicated her career to bridging the gap between academics and the general public and to demonstrating the benefits of applying historical perspective to contemporary dilemmas and conflicts.

Limerick was born and raised in Banning, California, and graduated from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1972. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University in 1980, and from 1980 to 1984 she was an Assistant Professor of History at Harvard. In 1984, Limerick moved to Boulder to join the History Department of the University of Colorado, where she was promoted to tenured Associate Professor in 1987 and to Full Professor in 1991. In 1985 she published Desert Passages, followed in 1987 by her best-known work, The Legacy of Conquest, an overview and reinterpretation of Western American history that has stirred up a great deal of both academic and public debate. Limerick is also a prolific essayist, and many of her most notable articles, including “Dancing with Professors: The Trouble with Academic Prose,” were collected in 2000 under the title Something in the Soil.

Limerick has received a number of awards and honors recognizing the impact of her scholarship and her commitment to teaching, including the MacArthur Fellowship (1995 to 2000) and the Hazel Barnes Prize, the University of Colorado’s highest award for teaching and research (2001). She has served as president of several professional organizations, advised documentary and film projects, and done two tours as a Pulitzer Nonfiction jurist. She regularly engages the public on the op-ed pages of local and national newspapers, and in the summer of 2005 she served as a guest columnist for the New York Times. Limerick is also known as an energetic, funny, and engaging public speaker, sought after by a wide range of Western constituencies that include private industry groups, state and federal agencies, and grassroots organizations.

In 1986, Limerick and CU Law Professor Charles Wilkinson founded the Center of the American West, and since 1995 it has been her primary point of affiliation. During her tenure, the Center has published a number of books, including the influential Atlas of the New West (1997), and a series of lively, balanced, and to-the-point reports on compelling Western issues, including What Every Westerner Should Know About Energy (2003), Cleaning Up Hardrock Abandoned Mines (2006), and What Every Westerner Should Know About Energy Efficiency and Conservation (2007). Limerick and Center staff are currently working on several projects, including a book about the role of the Department of Interior in the West, based on the “Inside Interior” series of interviews hosted by the Center between 2004 and 2006; an illustrated history of the Denver Water Board; and a PBS series titled The Lover’s Guide to the West. Under her leadership, the Center of the American West serves as a forum committed to the civil, respectful, problem-solving exploration of important, often contentious, public issues. In an era of political polarization and contention, the Center strives to bring out “the better angels of our nature” by appealing to our common loyalties and hopes as Westerners.

Pauline Maier

Pauline Maier is the William Rand Kenan, Jr., Professor of American History at MIT.  She was born and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota; went to Radcliffe College (Class of 1960), and, after a year as a Fulbright scholar in London, went on to get a Ph.D. in History at Harvard in 1968.  She was on the faculty of the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she was the Robinson-Edwards Professor of History, before going to MIT in 1978.  She has served on the boards of several journals and historical organizations, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and holds honorary doctorates from Regis College (1987) and Williams College (1993).

As a scholar, she writes mainly on the American Revolution and its heritage.  She has published numerous articles and several books, starting with From Resistance to Revolution: American Radicals and the Development of Intercolonial Opposition to Britain (Knopf, New York, 1972), The Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Samuel Adams (Knopf, New York, 1980), and a junior-high-school textbook, The American People: A History (D.C. Heath, Lexington, Mass., and Toronto, 1986). She is perhaps best known for American Scripture, Making the Declaration of Independence (Knopf, New York, 1997), which was on the New York Times Book Review editors' choice list of the eleven best books, fiction and nonfiction, of 1997.  More recently, she wrote the first eight chapters, covering American history from its beginning to 1800, of a  textbook, Inventing America, which is distinguished by the serious attention it gives to the history of science and technology and, more generally, innovation in the history of the American people.  The project was sponsored by the Sloan Foundation, and the final book--- the work of four historians, including MIT’s Merritt Roe Smith, Alexander Keyssar of Harvard, and Daniel Kevles of Yale--- was published in the summer of 2002 by the W.W. Norton Company; a second edition came out in 2006.  Simon and Schuster published her most recent book, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788,  in October 2010.

Professor Maier was a consultant and prominent "talking head" for several PBS television series, including Liberty! The American Revolution (1997), Biography of America, Primary Sources (2000 and 2001), and Benjamin Frankin (2002).  She has also appeared on several programs on the History Channel.

Emily Martin

Emily Martin has taught anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, Yale University, Johns Hopkins University, Princeton University and (currently) at New York University. She has served on the Board of Directors of the Social Science Research Council and as president of the American Ethnological Society. Her research has been supported by Fulbright awards, a Guggenheim fellowship, and grants from the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Spencer Foundation. She has done research on Chinese culture and society, which she published in The Cult of the Dead in a Chinese Village (Stanford University Press), Chinese Ritual and Politics (Cambridge University Press) and The Anthropology of Taiwanese Society, coedited with Hill Gates, (Stanford University Press). Based on her research in conceptions and practices of the body, the mind, work, health and personhood in American culture, she published The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction, Flexible Bodies: Tracking Immunity in America from the Days of Polio to the Age of AIDS (Beacon Press); and Bipolar Expeditions: Mania and Depression in American Culture (Princeton University Press). Bipolar Expeditions is affiliated with a website intended to provoke readers’ engagement and participation: www.livecrazy.org.

She is the founding editor of the public interest magazine Anthropology Now (www.anthronow.com) sponsored by the American Ethnological Association, funded in part by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and published by Paradigm Publishers. With Louis Sass and Elizabeth Lunbeck, Martin co-organizes the regional seminar, The Psyences Project. The Psyences Project brings clinicians into dialogue with academics around common interests in mind and brain as understood by disciplines such as psychology, psychiatry, and psychopharmacology in cultural and historical context. (http://www.nyu.edu/fas/ihpk/Psyences/PsyencesSP2006.htm)

Nabil Matar

Nabil Matar is Professor of English and adjunct professor of History and of Religious Studies at the University of Minnesota. He has also been a visiting fellow at Clare Hall College, Cambridge University, Harvard Divinity School, and France’s École des Hautes Études. In the past decade, the research of Professor Matar has focused on relations between Western Europe and the Islamic Mediterranean. Professor Matar has published a trilogy on Britain and the Islamic World: Islam in Britain 1558-1685 (Cambridge UP, 1998), Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (Columbia UP, 1999), and Britain and Barbary 1589-1689 (UP of Florida, 2005). His other trilogy is on Europe and the Islamic Mediterranean: In the Lands of the Christians (Routledge, 2004), Europe through Arab Eyes 1578-1727 (Columbia UP, 2009), and Arabs and Europeans in the Early Modern World (in progress). Matar is the author of over seventy articles and numerous encyclopedia and dictionary entries, including the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He has lectured widely in the United States, Britain, Morocco, Tunisia, and Jordan, and his work has been reviewed in major national and international journals. Professor Matar was recently named Scholar of the University of Minnesota's College of Liberal Arts.

Craig McEwen

Craig McEwen is the Daniel B. Fayerweather Professor of Political Economy and Sociology at Bowdoin College where he has taught since 1975.  A graduate of Oberlin College (B.A.) and Harvard (M.A. and Ph.D.), his research and commentary on mediation programs, courts, and lawyer professionalism have appeared in law reviews, social science journals and professional magazines.  With Lynn Mather and Richard Maiman, he co-authored Divorce Lawyers at Work:  Varieties of Professionalism in Practice.  In 2011 the third edition of his legal treatise with Nancy Rogers--Mediation:  Law, Policy, Practice--was published with added co-authors Sarah Cole, James Coben and Peter Thompson.  He has taught at Morgan State University and Ohio State’s Moritz College of Law.  He has chaired Maine’s Committee on Judicial Responsibility and Disability and has served on Maine’s Board of Overseers of the Bar and its Grievance Commission.

Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben is the author of a dozen books about the environment, beginning with The End of Nature in 1989, which is regarded as the first book for a general audience on climate change. He is a founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org, which has coordinated 15,000 rallies in 189 countries since 2009. Time Magazine called him "the planet's best green journalist" and the Boston Globe said in 2010 that he was "probably the country's most important environmentalist." McKibben is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College and holds honorary degrees from a dozen colleges, including the Universities of Massachusetts and Maine, the State University of New York, and Whittier and Colgate Colleges. In 2011 he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Peter Swirski

Featured in Canadian Who's Who, Peter Swirski is Professor and Research Director at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, Professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, and Honorary Professor at Jinan University, China. His research ranges from American Literature and American Studies to interdisciplinary studies in literature, philosophy, and science. He is also the world's foremost critic on the late legendary writer and philosopher, Stanislaw Lem.

Featured on European, Russian, and Chinese TV, he is the author of twelve acclaimed books, including the bestselling From Lowbrow to Nobrow (2005) and the National Book Award nominated Ars Americana, Ars Politica (2010). With several foreign translations, his books have been reviewed from the Guardian to the Financial Times and from Philosophy and Literature to the International Journal of Philosophical Studies.

 

Daniel M. Varisco

Daniel Martin Varisco is Professor of Anthropology at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, where he has taught since 1991.  He received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1982, based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in a highland Yemeni village.  During the 1980s, he consulted in international development in Yemen and Egypt, as well as receiving four post-doctoral grants for research on the history of Arab agriculture and folk astronomy.  He has served as President of the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association and is on the board of the American Institute for Yemeni Studies and The American Academic Research Institute in Iraq.  His most recent books are Reading Orientalism:  Said and the Unsaid (2007) and Islam Obscured:  The Rhetoric of Anthropological Representation (2005).  He has published more than forty-five articles in professional journals, as well as editing Yemen Update from 1990-2002.  He serves as co-editor of Contemporary Islam, editor of the online journal CyberOrient and webshaykh of the academic blog Tabsir.  He is currently working on a comprehensive history of Yemeni agriculture in the Islamic era entitled Arabia Viridis.