Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab joins Sarah Eltantawi to talk about the role of the intellectual and intellectual production in a tumultuous Arab world.

Dr. Kassab is author of Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in Comparative Perspective. She studied philosophy at the American University of Beirut and the University of Fribourg (Switzerland), where she obtained her doctorate degree with the thesis on “The Theory of Social Action in the Schutz-Parsons Debate”. She subsequently held positions at the University of Bielefeld, the American University of Beirut, and the University of Balamand. In 1999, Dr. Kassab received a Fulbright scholarship at New School University, New York, and then took posts at Columbia University and the Yale Center for International and Area Studies. From 2008 to 2009, Dr. Kassab was further research fellow at the Orient Institut Beirut, which forms part of the Max Weber Foundation. She then joined the department for West-Asian History at the University of Erfurt’s faculty of history before moving on to the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies at FU Berlin in 2011. In the spring semester of 2012, Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab was visiting professor at the Cogut Center for the Humanities at Brown University. From October 2013 until September 2014, she was fellow at the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities “Law as Culture”.