The New School Graduate Program in International Affairs

Ervand Abrahamian (B.A., M.A., Oxford University; Ph.D. Columbia University), an Armenian born in Iran and raised in England, is well qualified by education and experience to teach world and Middle East history. He has published Iran Between Two Revolutions, The Iranian Mojahedin, Khomeinism, Tortured Confessions, and Inventing the Axis of Evil. He teaches at the CUNY Graduate Center, and has taught at Princeton, New York University, and Oxford University. He is currently working on two books: one on The CIA Coup in Iran; and another, A History of Modern Iran, for Cambridge University Press.

Michael T. Klare is the Five College Professor of Peace and World Security Studies (a joint appointment at Amherst College, Hampshire College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst), and Director of the Five College Program in Peace and World Security Studies (PAWSS), a position he has held since 1985. Before assuming his present post, he served as Director of the Program on Militarism and Disarmament at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. (1977-1984). Professor Klare has written numerous books and articles on U.S. defense policy, the arms trade, and world security affairs, including most recently, Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America’s Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum. He is also the editor or co-editor of a number of books and journals. His new book, Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy, will be published by Petropolitan Books in April 2008..

Timothy Mitchell (B.A., Cambridge University; Ph.D., Princeton University) is Professor of Politics at New York University. His areas of expertise include the political economy of the Middle East, the political role of economics and other forms of expert knowledge, and the place of colonialism in the making of modernity. From 1996 to 2003 Professor Mitchell served as Director of NYU's Center for Near Eastern Studies, and he is an associate member of the Department of Middle Eastern Studies. From 2003 to 2007 he directed a project on “The Authority of Knowledge in a Global Age” at the International Center for Advanced Studies at NYU. Professor Mitchell is the author of Colonising Egypt, a widely-cited study of the emergence of the modern state in the colonial period and an exploration of the forms of reason, power and knowledge that define the experience of modernity. His most recent book is Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity.

Tom W. O'Donnell Thomas W. O'Donnell is a nuclear physicist (PhD Michigan) whose research and teaching also involves the social sciences and humanities.  His work examines the political-economy of the globalized oil sector and its geo-strategic implications, in particular as pertains to U.S. policy in the Middle East and Latin America.  Dr. O'Donnell teaches at The New School, Graduate Program in International Affairs and is a 2008 U.S. Fulbright Scholar to Venezuela (Universidad Central de Venezuela, Caracas) studying the political economy of oil as relates to the internal and external policies of its Bolivarian state in a comparison to Algerian policies.  Dr. O'Donnell is an associate member of the Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics, and previously taught at The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, on energy and the environment, and on technological and social transformations.  Before earning his PhD, Dr. O'Donnell organized workers in the automobile, railway and energy sectors in Detroit and Chicago, and wrote on political and economic affairs.  His research and writing are available at http://TomOD.com.

Neguin Yavari (B.A., Georgetown University; M.Phil, Ph.D., Columbia
University) is Assistant Professor of History at The New School. She has taught previously at Columbia University; the Institute of Ismaili Studies, London; the University of London; the Institute for Cultural Studies and Research, Tehran; and Al-Zahra University, Tehran. She is chiefly interested in the history of political thought of the medieval Islamic world; and her biography of Nizam al-Mulk is forthcoming. Her current project, The Sunni-Shi‘i Encounter, is a modern history of Muslim political thought.

Jonathan Bach (Ph.D., Syracuse University) is Associate Professor of International Affairs and the Associate Director of the Graduate Program in International Affairs at the New School. He works on contemporary reformulations of sovereignty, space, and identity. Before coming to the New School he held post-doctoral research positions at Columbia University’s Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy and Harvard University’s center for European Studies, and visiting positions at Columbia’s Harriman Institute and the Institute for Peace Research and Security Studies at the University of Hamburg. He is the author of Between Sovereignty and Integration: German Foreign Policy and National Identity after 1989 (St. Martin’s Press 1999), and his articles have appeared in Geopolitics, Public Culture, Studies in Comparative and International Development, Foreign Policy in Focus, Peace Review, and Philosophy and Social Science.