Professor Esposito is the author of over two-dozen works, many of which concern Islam. Islam: The Straight Path is an important work that is in its fourth edition. He is editor of The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, and author or co-author of several other important studies: The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality?, Islam and Democracy (with John Voll), Islam, Gender, and Social Change (with Yvonne Haddad), Islam in Asia, and Voices of Resurgent Islam. Professor Esposito?s lecture inaugurates the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies at The School of Humanities and Sciences, Stanford University.

In the United States since 9/11, there has been a tendency to reduce Southeast Asia's connections to the Middle East to religion: that is, to the Muslim faith shared by majori-ties east of the Mediterranean and south of the South China Sea, not to mention the Muslim minorities elsewhere in Southeast Asia. While addressing the changing nature and importance of this overlap, Professor von der Mehden will also analyze how and why these two regions, spatially so far apart, have been interacting on a range of economic, security, and political issues, including the question of Palestine. He will argue that there is more interaction today between the two regions than ever before. Each region has become more involved in the affairs of the other. But these burgeoning connections are not what they were expected to be. Nor are they all benign.

Fred von der Mehden is internationally known for his extensive scholarship on politics, religion, and development in Southeast Asia. His talk will update and expand on his 1993 book, Two Worlds of Islam: Interaction between Southeast Asia and the Middle East. A senior editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World (1995), Professor von der Mehden's many other books include Religion and Modernization in Southeast Asia (1986); Southeast Asia 1930-1970 (1974); Comparative Political Violence (1973); and Religion and Nationalism in Southeast Asia (1963). He has just returned from Southeast Asia, where he has lectured or done research almost every year since the 1950s. He is California-trained, having earned a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley; an M.A. from Claremont Graduate School; and a B.A. from the University of the Pacific.

This seminar is part of the Shorenstein Forum Cross-Strait Seminar Series. Dr. Wu Xinbo is currently a professor at the Center for American Studies, Fudan University, and the Vice-President, Shanghai Institute of American Studies. He teaches China-U.S. relations and writes widely about China?s foreign policy, Sino-American relations and Asia-Pacific issues. Professor Wu is the author of Dollar Diplomacy and Major Powers in China, 1909?1913 (Fudan University Press, 1997) and has published numerous articles and book chapters in China, the United States, Japan, Germany, South Korea, Singapore, and India. He is also a frequent contributor to Chinese and international newspapers. Born in 1966 in Anhui Province, East China, Wu Xinbo entered Fudan University in 1982 as an undergraduate student and received his B.A. in history in 1986. In 1992, he got his Ph.D. in international relations from Fudan University. In the same year, he joined the Center for American Studies, Fudan University. In 1994, he spent one year at the George Washington University as a visiting scholar. In fall 1997, he was a visiting fellow at the Asia-Pacific Research Center, Stanford University and the Henry Stimson Center in Washington DC. From January to August 2000, he was a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Karin Lee is the senior associate for the East Asia Policy Education Project for the Friends Committee on National Legislation.  Prior to this position, Karin worked for the American Friends Service Committee for many years, most recently based in Tokyo, where she facilitated regional exchanges on topics of peace, reconciliation, and economic justice. She has visited North Korea three times, and South Korea about twenty-five times. She is a regular contributor to the Korea Quarterly, for which she writes a column on U.S. policy toward the Koreas.

Octobers and democracy in Thailand are inextricably entwined. On 14 October 1973, thirty years to the day before Dr. Pitsuwan will speak at Stanford, Field Marshal Thanom Kittikachorn, Thailand's strongman prime minister, was driven into exile. Parliamentary democracy flourished for three years until it was violently shut down in October 1976 following Thanom's return. On 12 October 2002 in Bali, extremist Muslims took more than 200 lives and made terrorism an urgent priority for Thailand and other members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Relevant events in Southeast Asia in October 2003 include three summits--of ASEAN (Bali, 7-8 Oct.), of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (Kuala Lumpur, 16-18 Oct.), and of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum (Bangkok, 20-21 Oct.), the latter to include U.S. President George W. Bush. Dr. Pitsuwan will this unusual conjunction of anniversaries and summits to explore some of the ways in which democracy, terrorism, regionalism, and Islamism in Southeast Asia overlap and intersect. About the speaker Surin Pitsuwan served as Thailand's foreign minister from 1997 to 2001. He was the first Muslim to hold that post. He has been a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee in Thailand's House of Representatives since 1986. He has also been a columnist for Thai newspapers and a political science lecturer in Thammasat University. In 1983-84 he was a legislative assistant to U.S. Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro. He earned a PhD from Harvard University in 1982 after graduating cum laude from the Claremont Men's College in Claremont, California.