Public Diplomacy and National Identity

The USC Center on Public Diplomacy is pleased to host Professor Laurie Brand, former director of USC’s School of International Relations.

Professor Brand will discuss her current research related to narratives in the Arab world in a talk titled “Public Diplomacy and National Identity." She is currently a Carnegie Scholar and has recently returned from extended research in the Middle East.

Dr. Laurie A. Brand is the Robert Grandford Wright Professor and professor of international relations at the University of Southern California. She served as director of the Center for International Studies from 1997-2000, and as Director of the School of International Relations from 2006-09.

A past president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (2004), and currently chair of its Committee on Academic Freedom, she specializes in Middle East international relations and inter-Arab politics. A Carnegie Scholar for 2008-10 and a four-time Fulbright scholar to the Middle East and North Africa, she is the author of Palestinians in the Arab World: Institution Building and the Search for State (Columbia University Press, 1988), Jordan’s Inter-Arab Relations: The Political Economy of Alliance Making (Columbia University Press, 1994), Women, the State and Political Liberalization (Columbia University Press, 1998); and Citizens Abroad: States and Migration in the Middle East and North Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Her current research interests include emigration, state-expatriate relations and national narrative construction. She has carried out fieldwork in Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Kuwait. She is fluent in Arabic and French, highly proficient in Spanish, and has a basic working knowledge of Hebrew and German.

This is an invitation only event. For questions, please contact cpdevent@usc.edu.