On Sunday May 13, Professor Barbara Freyer Stowasser passed away in Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington D.C. Dr. Stowasser was a professor in the Arab and Islamic Studies department for 18 years. Her first lectures at Georgetown date back to 1966. The Center for Contemporary Arab Studies created a Facebook thread in honor of Dr. Stowasser with a long thread of comments from friends and family giving condolences and remembering her legacy.

Stowasser was the director of CCAS on three different occasions during her time at Georgetown and an invaluable scholar on women’s studies in the Qur’an and hadith.The CCAS website describes her as a “colleague of rare intellect, compassion, and humor.” She also served on the Board of Advisory Editors for the Middle East Journal.

In addition to the Facebook thread, CCAS also made a “podbean” page with a space for students, faculty, and friends to leave their thoughts about Stowasser’s time at Georgetown. In a comment on the page, a professor remarked that Stowasser was an inspiration. “Of all the professors who trained me, Barbara Stowasser is one of the ones I think of most often as a role model now that I am professor myself … I also adored her for her sudden quirky laugh, and for her sense of compassion,” the comment read.

In an email yesterday to the Georgetown community, Provost Jim O’Donnell informed students and faculty about her death, stating that “It is hard to describe just how much we lose with her passing.”

Feel free to use the commenting space below to share your memories or condolences. Please remain mindful and respectful

Photo: Center for Contemporary Arab Studies

In August, Georgetown received more than $5.6 million from the Department of Education through the National Resource Centers and Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship program.

The Title VI grant, issued by both programs, supports foreign language, area, and international studies programs in U.S. colleges and universities.

Three centers in the SFS were awarded funding to establish or enhance their respective NRCs, including the the National Resource Center on Asian Studies.

The Center for Latin American Studies also applied for a grant but did not receive one, according to Director of Asian Studies Victor Cha.

Cha was particularly excited for the Asian Studies program’s first-ever Title VI grant, which gave the program over a million dollars worth of support.

“These grants are based on potential. We are not, in terms of Asian Studies, at the level of other major research universities like Columbia, Stanford, or Berkeley,” Cha said. “We have a very strong faculty in Asian Studies and a very strong Korean, Japanese, and Chinese language programs. That’s what helped us get the grant.”

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Earlier this week, I wrote about a Jerusalem Post piece that attacked two Georgetown centers, the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and the Center for Muslim Christian Understanding, and championed the Program for Jewish Civilization as an antidote to those two.

Since my initial post, a few more of the relevant faculty members have chimed in with their responses, with professors on both sides saying that the article was ill-informed about what actually goes on here on campus. Listen to what CMCU Director John Esposito and PJC Director Jacques Berlinerblau have to say, after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

The fighting in Gaza may have cooled for now, but the Arab-Israeli conflict seems to have set its sights on Georgetown.

Amir Romirowsky of the Jerusalem Post published an article earlier this week lauding Georgetown’s Program for Jewish Civilization and lambasting the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS) and the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (CMCU), alleging that the Centers have a pro-Arab bias.

CMCU Associate Director John Voll called the article “basically ill-informed” and took issue with its characterization of his Center as “the locus of academic apologetics for Wahhabism in America”:

“I have seen the article and am glad to see that the Program for Jewish Studies gets a positive description. However,the author clearly has not bothered to read anything that the people on the faculty of the Alwaleed Center have written. For example, I would find it difficult to describe what I have written on Sufism (the mystical tradition in Islam which is opposed by strict Wahhabi teachers) as presenting ‘a glossy version of Wahhabi Islam.’”

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