Media contact: Yvonne Taunton
Join the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Department of History to hear from an expert on the French colonization of Syria and the rise of Islamism in the Middle East at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 16, via Zoom.
This year’s Belton-Cooper Annual Lecture in Military History is titled “Paris 1919 as Counter-Revolution: The French Occupation of Syria and the Rise of Anti-Western Islamism” and features Professor Elizabeth F. Thompson, Ph.D., the Mohamed S. Farsi Chair of Islamic Peace at the School of International Service at American University.
Thompson is a historian and an alumna of Harvard University and Columbia University. She focuses on how race and gender relations have been conditioned by foreign intervention and international law. Thompson is the first endowed university chair in the United States to be devoted to the study of Islam and peace.
In the early 1920s, the League of Nations formalized French control of Syria, which included the territory of present-day Lebanon in addition to modern Syria. Thompson will speak about the links between the anti-French resistance in this Muslim-majority region to other forms of racial tension and counter-revolution around the world, including in the United States.
The lecture is free and open to public.
To register for the event, please visit go.uab.edu/paris1919.