Susan Hyde is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at Yale University, where she is affiliated with the MacMillian Center and the Institute for Social and Policy Studies. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego in 2006, and has held fellowships at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. and Princeton University's Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance. Her research interests include international influences on domestic politics, elections in developing countries, international norm creation, election manipulation, and the use of natural and field experimental research methods. Her current research explores the effects of international democracy promotion efforts, and her research has been published in World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Perspectives on Politics, the Journal of Politics. She has recently completed a book entitled The Pseudo-Democrat's Dilemma: Why Election Monitoring Became an International Norm.  She has served as an international observer with several organizations for elections in Albania, Indonesia, Nicaragua, Pakistan and Venezuela, and has worked for the Democracy Program at The Carter Center. She teaches courses on international organizations, democracy promotion, the global spread of elections, and the role of non-state actors in world politics.

CO-SPONSORED BY COMPARATIVE POLITICS

Elias Muhanna is a PhD candidate in Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations at Harvard University and the author of QifaNabki.com, a blog devoted to Lebanese political affairs. He has written extensively on contemporary cultural and political affairs in the Middle East for several general-interest publications, including The Nation, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, The National, Mideast Monitor, World Politics Review, Bidoun, and Transition, and is regularly quoted in media outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Financial Times, The Los Angeles Times, National Public Radio, The Christian Science Monitor, Slate, and Al-Jazeera International.

Music videos are ubiquitous in contemporary Arab public life. As captivating audio-visual blurbs, music videos attract attention; they are interesting not only because of their provocative aesthetics, but because they spotlight controversial issues and elicit impassioned reactions from public figures and ordinary people alike. Discussing religious videos that elaborate an Islamic vision of globalization, pop videos that subvert dominant social norms, play with Christian imagery, and create a fantasy world, in addition to focusing the discussion on videos about the US occupation of Iraq, Kraidy considers music videos as instruments of visibility in a saturated media economy suffering from attention scarcity.

Marwan M. Kraidy is Associate Professor of Global Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. His publications include Reality Television and Arab Politics: Contention in Public Life (Cambridge, 2009), which won the 2010 Best Book Award in Global Communication and Social Change, from the International Communication Association, Arab Television Industries (BFI/Palgrave, 2009, with J. Khalil), Hybridity, or, The Cultural Logic of Globalization (Temple, 2005), and the edited volumes Global Media Studies: Ethnographic Perspectives (Routledge, 2003), and The Politics of Reality Television: Global Perspectives (Routledge, 2010).

Sponsored by:

• Program on Good Governance and Political Reform in the Arab World, CDDRL
• Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies
• Humanities Center
• African and Middle Eastern Languages and Literatures Program
• Bowen H. McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society

Larry May is a political philosopher who has written on conceptual issues in collective and shared responsibility, as well as normative issues in international criminal law. He has also written on professional ethics and on the Just War tradition.  

In addition to being W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Law at Vanderbilt University, he is also a Professorial Fellow at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, Charles Sturt University in Canberra.  He has previously taught at Washington University, Purdue University, University of Wisconsin, and University of Connecticut. 

He has published 25 books and 100 articles. His five most recent authored books have been published by Cambridge University Press, including: "Genocide: A Normative Account" (2010) and "Global Justice and Due Process" (2011). 

His authored books have won awards from the American Philosophical Association, the North American Society for Social Philosophy, the International Association of Penal Law, the American Society of International Law, and the American Library Association. His writings have been translated into French, German, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Serbian, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean.

Professor May has lectured extensively around the world, including, in the last two years, keynote or plenary addresses at conferences in: Oxford, St. Andrews, Oslo, Helsinki, Krakow, Belgrade, Bielefeld, The Hague, Delft, Leiden, Montreal, Victoria, Toronto, Canberra, Melbourne, and Sydney.  

He has served on the board of directors of the American Philosophical Association and is past president of AMINTAPHIL, the American section of the International Society for Philosophy of Law. In addition, he has occasionally taken a criminal appeals case, and has worked on several death penalty cases, in the United States.