A lecture by Kelly J. Shannon ’03—author, professor, and specialist in the history of U.S. foreign relations during the 20th century.

Campus community only, please.

As U.S. attention to the Middle East and other Muslim-majority regions became more focused and sustained after 1979, the issue of women’s human rights in Islamic societies was one that Americans gradually identified as vitally important to U.S. foreign policy. Ultimately, feminist campaigns and U.S. policies emerged that aimed to defend women’s rights in Islamic countries. This lecture will focus on the example of the Clinton Administration’s refusal to recognize the Taliban regime that took power in Afghanistan in 1996 because of the Taliban's oppression of women, as well as the present-day consequences of this story. Based on an analysis of a wide range of sources and historical actors—including journalists, academics, activists, NGOs, the public, Muslim women, Islamic fundamentalists, and U.S. policymakers—Shannon’s research challenges traditional interpretations of U.S. foreign policy that assert the primacy of “hard power” concerns in U.S. decision making. By reframing U.S.-Islamic relations with respect to women’s human rights, and revealing faulty assumptions about the drivers of U.S. foreign policy, Shannon sheds new light on U.S. identity and policy creation and alters the standard narratives of the U.S. relationship with the Muslim world in the closing years of the Cold War and the emergence of the post-Cold War era.

Kelly J. Shannon, PhD is Associate Professor of History, the Chastain-Johnston Middle Eastern Studies Distinguished Professor in Peace Studies, and the Executive Director of the Center for Peace, Justice, and Human Rights at Florida Atlantic University (FAU). She specializes in the 20th-century history of U.S. foreign relations, with particular attention to the Islamic world, Iran, transnational history, women, and human rights. She is the author of Author of U.S. Foreign Policy and Muslim Women’s Human Rights (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). She earned her PhD in history at Temple University, her MA in history at the University of Connecticut, and her BA in history from Vassar College. Shannon is currently working on a book about U.S. relations with Iran during the first half of the 20th century, tentatively entitled The Ties That Bind: U.S.-Iran Relations, 1905-1953, as well as a book geared toward a general audience on the transnational history of U.S. feminism(s), American Feminism and the World since 1945: An International History.