About the commencement speaker

Emile Sahliyeh, associate professor of political science, joined the UNT Department of Political Science in 1987.

An expert on the Middle East, he was quoted frequently by the media during the Persian Gulf War and continues to be a media source regarding the war in Iraq. Sahliyeh has been interviewed by the Christian Science Monitor, the Dallas Morning News, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post. He teaches undergraduate courses on international relations; conflict in the Middle East; governments and politics of the Middle East; and Islam, democracy and human rights. He also teaches several graduate courses.

Sahliyeh is the author of the books The PLO After the Lebanon War, In Search of Leadership: West Bank Politics Since 1967 and Religious Resurgence and Politics in the Contemporary World. He has also written chapters in anthologies on Middle Eastern politics, and his articles have been published in the Jerusalem Journal of International Relations, the Journal of Palestine Studies, the International Studies Quarterly, Electoral Studies, the Journal of Asian and African Studies and the Washington Quarterly. He is currently completing a manuscript on the status of democracy and human rights in the Middle East.

Sahliyeh lectures widely in the United States and the Middle East. As part of the U.S. State Department speakers program, he visited Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Yemen, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Israel and Palestine.

The director of the international studies major at UNT since 1999, Sahliyeh was named a Student Association Honor Professor in 2001 and also received the citation for Distinguished Service to International Education at the university.

He earned bachelor's and master's degrees in international relations and political science from the American University of Beirut in Lebanon and a doctorate in political science from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Before joining the faculty at North Texas, he taught at Birzeit University in Palestine and was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.

Sahliyeh was born in the Christian Quarter in Jerusalem. He is married and has two daughters.

BY MAGAN HENDON inhouse@unt.edu

Other featured articles in this issue

• New InHouse@UNT format to launch in September
• Administrators to propose 2 percent merit raise pools for UNT faculty and staff
• Regents to discuss campus plans for Denton and Dallas at August meeting
• UNT to use multimillion-dollar bequest to fund unique research of behavior analysis
• UNT opens Honors College for Fall 2005
• Exhibit about UNT's branding process opens this month
• UNT summer commencement is Saturday
• UNT's First Flight Week, Howdy Week traditions continue this month
• Win a trip to Baton Rouge on UNT's Regal Eagle bus

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