Understanding Syria - Wendy Pearlman

Free and open to the public. There will be a reception with good food and drinks at 5 P.M.

Lecture Description
After 54 years of brutal dictatorship and 14 years of merciless war, Syrians have achieved their freedom. How did the Syria get here? What challenges and opportunities lie ahead? Northwestern University Professor Wendy Pearlman explores these questions, drawing from interviews that she conducted with more than 500 displaced Syrians around the world over the past 13 years and featured in her two books, We Crossed A Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria (2017) and The Home I Worked to Make: Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora (2024). Combining these moving personal stories with her own political analysis, Pearlman puts the stunning collapse of the Assad regime in a broader historical context and reminds us of what is at stake, in human terms.

Speaker Biography
Wendy Pearlman is the Jane Long Professorship of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. She earned her PhD from Harvard, has studied Arabic and the Arab world for thirty years, and is the author of six books and more than 40 academic articles or book chapters on the Middle East. Since 2011, she has interviewed more than 500 Syrians around the world about their life experiences. She shares their testimonials in two books. We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria, published in 2017 and longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, is a mosaic of personal testimonials chronicling the Syrian uprising, war, and displacement crisis. The Home I Worked to Make: Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora, published in 2024, interweaves narratives of displaced Syrians on five continents reflecting on losing home, searching for home, and rethinking the meaning of home.

https://www.une.edu/events/2025/understanding-syria

You may also like the following events from UNE Center for Global Humanities:

• This October, 22nd October, 01:00 pm, What Evolution and Human Nature Imply about the Meaning of Our Existence - Samuel T. Wilkinson in Biddeford
• This November, 17th November, 06:00 pm, The Mysterious Case of the "Girl Spy" - Elizabeth DeWolfe in Portland
• This December, 8th December, 06:00 pm, The Past Is Not Past: Embracing the Politics of Memory - Anthony Walton in Portland

Also check out other Arts events in Portland, Fine Arts events in Portland, Literary Art events in Portland.