Guide to Specialists

Keith David Watenpaugh
Senior Fellow, Jennings Randolph Fellowship Program
September 1, 2008 – June 30, 2009

Project Focus:
The Middle East and Human Rights: Mass Violence, Refugees, and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism

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Phone: (202) 429-3877

E-mail: kwatenpaugh@usip.org

Languages: Arabic | Armenian | Turkish

A historian and associate professor of Modern Islam, Human Rights and Peace in the Religious Studies program at the University of California, Davis, Keith Watenpaugh is completing a book that will bring the Middle East into the larger history of human rights. His book will shed light on how the international community has conceptualized minority-majority relationships in Muslim societies and sectarian and ethnic differences in the Arab world. It will focus on the multiple intersections of the modern international human rights regime, genocide and Islam in the twentieth-century Middle East.

Watenpaugh was trained at UCLA, and has lived and conducted research in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Iraq. He conducted research in Iraq both before and after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion and occupation. In June 2003 he traveled to Iraq to lead the first independent assessment of Baghdad's libraries, research centers and universities. His team's efforts took the form of the widely used report, Opening the Doors: Intellectual Life and Academic Conditions in Post-War Baghdad. He served on the Middle East Studies Association's Committee on Academic Freedom in the Middle East and North Africa (2003–2006), and has worked with the Scholars at Risk program on behalf of Iraqi academic refugees as well as the University of California Initiative on Human Rights.

Watenpaugh has received several noteworthy grants, including the CIEE Fulbright, Fulbright-Hays, Social Science Research Council, Will Rogers and the American Academic Research Institute in Iraq fellowships. He was the Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow in Middle East Studies at Williams College (1998–2000), a visiting Scholar at Harvard's Center of Middle East Studies (2004) and in 2005–2006 he was the George S. and Dolores Dore Eccles Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Democracy and Diversity at the Tanner Humanities Center, University of Utah. Recently Watenpaugh was a finalist for the Academic Senate's Distinguished Teaching Award and received a UC Davis Washington Program Fellowship.

Watenpaugh received a B.A. in history and near eastern languages and culture from the University of Washington, Seattle and an M.A. and Ph.D. in history from UCLA.

Publications:

• Being Modern in the Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Arab Middle Class (Princeton University Press, 2006).
• "Middle-class Modernity and the Persistence of the Politics of Notables in Syria under French Rule," The International Journal of Middle East Studies (Vol. 35, No. 2, 2003).
• “Death of Iraq's middle class: The country's best and brightest have fled, demolishing hope for the country's future,” Chicago Sun Times, January 1, 2007.
• “Middle East Brain Drain,” National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation, November 22, 2006.