On Thursday, March 26, Buckley Fellows are invited to a dinner with writer Roya Hakakian, Yale School of Medicine Professor Evan Morris, and Yale School of Management Professor Ed Kaplan for a talk titled, “Shining a light on academic boycotts of Israeli institutions and academics.” The three experts will discuss the new short film by Hakakian and Morris, “Indivisible: The Israeli Academy after October 7th,” which examines the impact of international academic boycotts on Israel’s universities and hospitals in the wake of the October 7 attacks.
Roya Hakakian is a writer whose work often deals with the topics of exile, displacement, political and religious persecution, and the struggle of people, especially women, against authoritarianism. Her memoir,
Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran (Crown, 2005) details the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in her birth country in the aftermath of the 1979 revolution. The book quickly captured the attention of readers and reviewers alike and was Barnes & Noble’s Pick of the Week,
Ms. Magazine Must Read of the Summer,
Publishers Weekly’s Best Book of the Year,
Elle Magazine’s Best Nonfiction of the year, and the Best Memoir by the Connecticut Center for the Book and has been translated into several languages including German, Dutch, and Spanish. In 2008, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship in nonfiction.
Her second book,
Assassins of the Turquoise Palace (Grove/Atlantic, 2011), is the account of the 1992 murders of four Iranian-Kurdish leaders in Berlin, Germany, its investigation, and the four-year trial and historic judgment that ensued. The book was hailed as both a thriller and a suspenseful courtroom drama.
The New York Times Book Review listed the book among its most Notable Books of 2011, and it made
Newsweek’s Top Ten Not-to-be-missed books of the year, as well as
Kirkus Reviews Best Non-Fictions of the year. Hakakian’s most recent book, A
Beginner’s Guide to America for the Immigrant and the Curious (Knopf, 2021) has been called a “love letter” to America and its democracy. In addition to her books, she has also written essays and opinion pieces for leading journals including
The New York Times,
New York Review of the Books, and
The Atlantic, to name a few. She has collaborated on over a dozen hours of programming for leading journalism units on network television, including CBS 60 Minutes and ABC Documentary Specials. She has been a guest on all the principal networks and radios, including CNN, MSNBC and NPR.
She is a founding member of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, and has served on the board of Refugees International. She was a fellow at Yale University’s Davenport College and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. For ’23-’24 academic year, she has been selected as a fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. She serves on the editorial board of the
American Purpose and has made countless public appearances from offering testimonies at the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee to high schools on native American reservations in Montana.
Prior to writing prose in English, Hakakian composed two collections of poems in Persian and is listed among the leading voices of contemporary Persian poetry in the
Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World. Her poetry has appeared in numerous anthologies around the world, including
Strange Times My Dear: The Pen Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature.
Born and raised in a family of Jewish educators in Tehran, Roya arrived in the US as a refugee in 1985.
Professor Edward Kaplan’s research has been reported on the front pages of The New York Times and The Jerusalem Post, editorialized in
The Wall Street Journal, recognized by
The New York Times Magazine’s Year in Ideas, and discussed in many other major media outlets. The author of more than 125 research articles, Professor Kaplan received both the Lanchester Prize and the Edelman Award, two top honors in the operations research field, among many other awards. An elected member of both the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine of the US National Academies, he has also twice received the prestigious Lady Davis Visiting Professorship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he has investigated AIDS policy issues facing the State of Israel. Kaplan’s current research focuses on the application of operations research to problems in counterterrorism and homeland security.
He is past-president of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), the world’s largest society of operations research and analytics academics and professionals.
Evan Morris is a professor of Biomedical Imaging and Biomedical Engineering at Yale. He specializes in Kinetic Modeling of PET data for studying the brain. He has taught courses on Imaging and on Professional Ethics for many years at Yale and before that, Indiana University and Purdue University.
He writes on science policy, higher ed, and antisemitism.
