The David M. Kennedy Center for International Studies at Brigham Young University will host a trio of lectures on the Middle East, ancient and modern, during the week of April 2.
All lectures will take place in 238 Herald R. Clark Building. Admission is free, and the public is welcome to attend.
April 4 — “Bagram to Baghdad: Five Years Covering the War on Terror” will be the subject of an address by Dodge Billingsley, documentary filmmaker and director of Combat Films and Research, Wednesday, April 4, at noon.
For this lecture, Billingsley will recap the progression of the Iraq war from his firsthand accounts of being embedded with troops in both locations.
Since graduating from Columbia University and King’s College in London, Billingsley has captured the essence of war in Chechnya, Iraq and Afghanistan, among other places. He also created “Firepower 2000,” exploring weapons and the changing nature of warfare, for the Discovery Channel and a three-part series on the Gulf War for the History Channel, along with numerous other works through Combat Films, which he founded in 1997.
Recently, Billingsley produced “Beyond the Border,” a five-film series and panel discussion, BYU’s David M. Kennedy Center. The latest installment, “Global Car,” is due for release this fall.
April 4-5 — Fayza M. H. Haikal, professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo, is scheduled to present “Spirituality in Ancient and Modern Egypt” Wednesday, April 4, at 3 p.m. and “Libraries in Ancient Egypt” Thursday, April 5, at 11 a.m.
Haikal, whose specialty centers on ancient Egyptian language, earned degrees in Egyptology from the University of Cairo and Oxford University. Her professional accomplishments include serving as coordinating director of the North Sinai Archaeological Salvage Project, as president of the International Association of Egyptologists and as a member of the administrative boards of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, the Coptic Museum and Cairo University’s Centre for Engineering of Archaeological Monuments.
Haikal’s publications include “Two Hieratic Funerary Papyri of Nesmin” and “Le Tombeau de Pennout a Aniba,” as well as many academic articles. She was also recently elected to the renowned Egyptian Academy of Science.
These lectures will be archived online. For more information on David M. Kennedy Center events, see the calendar online at kennedy.byu.edu.
Writer: Lee Simons
