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Professor Joseph Sassoon Named MAAS News (Student News) New CCAS Director By Paul Dougherty
engage with a new academic environment, to supporting them to develop their interests and navigate their subsequent careers, Sassoon has built close relationships with CCAS students. Through conversations with students, Sassoon knows that the Center’s reputation for academic excellence is what sets it apart from peer institutions. “It’s always interesting to hear feedback from the students on what they benefited from at the Center,” he says. “It is obvious that the academic rigor, the people whom they met during the two years that they were studying and the emphasis on the Arabic language are what make our program truly unique among all centers of Arab studies,” he adds. Continuing to provide a top-tier academic program for students is a key goal for Sassoon as he transitions to his new role. He hopes to expand opportunities for students to take on real-world regional challenges and tackle ongoing, current issues in the classroom. He cites a workshop that CCAS ran last November as an example of how effective this kind of hands-on learning can be. As protests against authoritarian regimes broke out across the Arab world, CCAS invited four regional experts to work with students to analyze the situation in four different countries and identify commonalities and differences between the demonstrations. The workshop enabled students to hone the skills they would need to work as regional
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rofessor Joseph Sassoon, who will soon take on a new role as director for the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS), plans to build upon his experience in both academia and business in his new position. He will take over the position from Professor Rochelle Davis, who has served as CCAS Director since 2017.
Board Member Profile
Sassoon’s appointment comes at a historic moment for SFS, when COVID-19 restrictions have forced Georgetown to move to an entirely online learning environment. While this presents significant challenges for CCAS, and the university more widely, Sassoon is confident that he will be able to work closely with his colleagues and draw upon insights from his own career to steer CCAS through this extraordinary moment. “I might be the first virtual director of the Center in its 40 year history,” he says. “The challenges are huge, but I hope that my decade of experience being at the Center, as well as my business management experience, will combine to give me the tools I need.”
Salem Al Sabah Chair in Politics and Political Economy of the Arab World at Georgetown and is a Senior Associate Member at St Antony’s College, Oxford. He is the author of numerous books, including Saddam Hussein’s Ba‘th Party: Inside an Authoritarian Regime, which won the prestigious British-Kuwait Prize for the best book on the Middle East. He also spent time in the private sector, working for an investment firm where he gained experience managing large teams of people. “It’s obviously different from managing an academic center at a university,” he says. “But that experience is valuable and the lessons are still embedded—they don’t disappear.”
Decades of Experience in Academia and Beyond
Building on Academic Excellence
Sassoon brings impressive career accomplishments and expertise in various fields to his new role. A top Middle-East scholar, Sassoon currently holds the Sheikh Sabah Al
Dispatches برقيات
Throughout his ten-year tenure as a CCAS professor, Sassoon has had the opportunity to see many generations of students progress through their degrees. From helping them
Beshara Doumani (MAAS ‘80) Family Life in the Ottoman Mediterranean: A Social History Cambridge University Press, 2017
مركز الدراسات العربية املعاصرة – جامعة جورجتاون
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