February 5, 1999		Religious Factors in Middle East Politics to Be Focus of Oberlin College Lecture Media Contact: Betty Gabrielli
	1999 Mead-Swing Lecture: "Religious Factors in Politics in the Middle East" Friday, Feb. 19 12:15 p.m. Room 106 King Building   Free and open to the public		"Religious Factors in Politics in the Middle East" is the title of the lecture to be presented by Dr. Leila Fawaz as part of Oberlin College's 1999 Mead-Swing lecture series. Dr. Fawaz is dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Jackson College for Arts & Humanities at Tufts University. She also holds a joint appointment at Tufts as professor of history and as professor of diplomacy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Her talk, which is free and open to the public, will be held at 12:15 p.m., Friday, February 19 in Room 106 of Oberlin College's King Building. Dr. Fawaz received her Ph.D. and A.M. degrees from Harvard University and B.A. and M.A. degrees from the American University of Beirut. She regularly participates in conferences, study groups and panels on the topics of the social and political history of the modern Middle East in the 19th and 20th centuries. Her books include An Occasion for War: Mount Lebanon and Damascus in 1860 (University of California Press: 1994) and Migrants and Merchants in Nineteenth-Century Beirut (Harvard University Press: 1983). She contributes articles to leading professional journals. She also is the editor of a series on "History and Society in the Modern Middle East" at Columbia University and is former editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Middle East Studies. Dr. Fawaz is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations, the Academic Council of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University, and the Visiting Committee of the Middle East Center at Harvard University.