EVENT TIME:

5:00 - 6:00pm PDT (via Zoom)

ABOUT:

SOAS Alumna and USAID development practitioner Elisabeth Kvitashvili will be in conversation with SOAS Alumnus and Vice-Chair of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at University of California Berkeley, Dr. Laurence Michalak. They will be discussing the endemic problem of structural racism, the death of American exceptionalism and the dismantling of our institutional safeguards against excessive Presidential power which threatens the viability of US democracy.

EVENT ACCESS:

You must register for this event here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/afsoas-presents-attention-to-the-home-front-tickets-111122249640

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SPEAKERS:

Elisabeth Kvitashvili

Elisabeth is an accomplished development practitioner with global humanitarian and crisis response leadership and field operations expertise spanning more than 35 years with USAID in countries such as Sri Lanka, Georgia, Russia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Bosnia, Honduras, Rwanda, DRC and the Horn of Africa. Among many assignments, she served as Director of the Disaster Response Division in the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA) and Mission Director in Russia and Sri Lanka. She was the founding director of USAID’s Office of Conflict Management and Mitigation which launched new ways of thinking and approaching development through a conflict lens. She later led USAID efforts in transforming how the Agency approached engagement in Non-Permissive Environments. 

Now retired from USAID, she remains engaged through a variety of international consulting assignments and Board of Director positions including with Give2Asia and CDA. She is President of the Georgian Association in the USA. She mentors USAID officers and, graduates of Georgetown University and University of London’s SOAS. Elisabeth has an MA degree from London University, School of Oriental and Africa Studies (SOAS), with a focus on Near East Studies. 

Professor Laurence Michalak

Vice-Chair of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and Lecturer Laurence Michalak is a cultural anthropologist and specialist in North Africa and Western Europe. Born in Woodland, California, he completed his B.A. at Stanford (1964) before going on to do an M.A. Near And Middle Eastern Studies 1970 at SOAS, University of London and a Ph.D. at UC Berkeley (1983). He later joined the University of California and was Vice Chair of UCB’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies and taught for 23 years before retiring in 2002. Besides Arabic, he speaks fluent French, good Spanish, and fair German. He has traveled widely in North Africa, the Middle East, Europe, Asia, and Latin America, and was also was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Tunisia. He has taught and lectured on the anthropology of food, tourism, migration, globalization, and problems of economic development. He is the author of books on social legislation and labor migration and is currently working on a book on informal commerce.