Bassam Haddad is Founding Director of the Middle East and Islamic Studies Program and Associate Professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. He is the author of Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience (Stanford University Press, 2011) and co-editor of A Critical Political Economy of the Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2021). Bassam is Co-Founder/Editor of Jadaliyya Ezine and Executive Director of the Arab Studies Institute. He serves as Founding Editor of the Arab Studies Journal and the Knowledge Production Project. He is co-producer/director of the award-winning documentary film, About Baghdad, and director of the acclaimed series Arabs and Terrorism. Bassam is Executive Producer of Status Podcast Channel and Director of the Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI). He received MESA's Jere L. Bacharach Service Award in 2017 for his service to the profession. Currently, Bassam is working on his second Syria book titled Understanding The Syrian Tragedy: Regime, Opposition, Outsiders (forthcoming, Stanford University Press).
Season 18 Episode 3:
Is the United States Becoming a Shithole Country?
Featuring:
Sinan Antoon
Adel Iskandar
Bassam Haddad
Tuesday, 11 February 2025
2:00 PM EST
Contrary to popular thought, becoming a shithole country comes with some huge perks. Who needs to think about and spend precious resources on education, healthcare, environmental protection, creating jobs, and other laborious and inconvenient chores? The “shithole” concept was a paradigmatic and pedriatic shift in how global policy is conducted. Trump’s latest dump poses new questions we will consider rigorously and religiously, God willing. Also, who does not like resorts? Or a good cleanse?
Featuring expert hosts of “3Arabs&,” Bassam Haddad, Sinan Antoon, and Adel Iskandar, a multinational triglyceride think tank that provides satirical dilution to contemporary banalities.
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Featuring
Sinan Antoon is a poet, novelist, scholar and translator. He has published five novels and two collections of poetry. A third collection of poetry in English, entitled Postcards from the Underworld, was published by Seagull Books this past October. He has been described as one of the most acclaimed Arab novelists. His most recent work in Arabic is a novel entitled, Khuzama
His literary translations from Arabic include Saadi Youssef’s Nostalgia; My Enemy and Mahmoud Darwish’s In the Presence of Absence which won the National Translation Award given by the American Literary Translators Association. His scholarly works include the book, Ibn al-Hajjaj and Sukhf: The Poetics of the Obscene in Pre-Modern Arabic Poetry. He is associate professor at New York University. He is co-founder and co-editor of Jadaliyya.
Adel Iskandar is an Associate Professor of Global Communication at Simon Fraser University, where he is the Director of the Centre for Comparative Muslim Studies and the Chair of Graduate Studies in the School of Communication. He is the author, co-author and co-editor of numerous works including Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation(University of California Press, 2010). Iskandar is a Co-Editor of Jadaliyya.