Jan. 31, 2011
Professor Jon Anderson at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., is available to discuss social media and the politics of the Middle East. For assistance in reaching him, contact Mary McCarthy or Katie Lee at 202-319-5600 or cua-public-affairs@cua.edu .
Anderson is an anthropologist who has done research on tribalism in Afghanistan, Islamic cosmology in Pakistan, and now on the information revolution in the Middle East. He has studied Internet pioneering in Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. He has lectured widely - recently at the universities of Westminster and Durham in the United Kingdom; Lund in Sweden; Lyon in France; George Washington and Georgetown in Washington, D.C.; Stanford in California; and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of California, Los Angeles.
At Georgetown, he is co-director of the Arab Information Project of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. His current interests are civil society, cyberculture, and globalization in the Internet age, which are reflected in a keynote address on Blogging, Networked Publics and the Politics of Communication for a symposium of the University of Arizona's School of Journalism.
He has served as editor of the multidisciplinary Middle East Studies Association Bulletin , program chair of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), chair of AAA's Advisory Group on Electronic Communication, president of the Middle East Section of AAA, on a Social Science Research Council steering committee for Information Technology and International Cooperation, and is currently on the international board of the World Congress of Middle East Studies.
Recent publications include "Between Freedom & Coercion: Inside Internet Implantation in the Middle East" in The New Arab Media: Technology, Image and Perception edited by Mahjoob Zweiri and Emma C. Murphy (2010) and "Electronic Media and New Muslim Publics" in The New Cambridge History of Islam, Vol. 6 Muslims & Modernity (2009).
Anderson can be reached at anderson@cua.edu or 202-319-5080.
To search for other CUA faculty who serve as experts for the media, visit the online Faculty Experts Guide at http://publicaffairs.cua.edu/experts/ or contact the Office of Public Affairs for more assistance at 202-319-5600.