The Liberal Arts Honors Program will host a lecture by Dr. Jocelyne Cesari, an author and a scholar in Islamic studies, on Thursday, March 17.

Her presentation, “Islam and Democracy in the Global Era,” will begin at 7:00 p.m. in Slavin Center ’64 Hall and is open to the College community. The lecture will serve as a supplement to the study of Islam in the College’s Development of Western Civilization curriculum.

A visiting associate professor of Islamic studies at Harvard Divinity School, Cesari has been a research associate in the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard since spring 2001. Her areas of expertise include the sociology of religion and Islam, Muslim minorities in Europe and America, and Islam and politics in North Africa.

Cesari has written two books on Islam. When Islam and Democracy Meet: Muslims in Europe and in the United States was published in 2004 by Palgrave Macmillan. Her second book, provisionally entitled Islam, Globalization, and the West, is forthcoming from the same publisher.

At Harvard, she has served as a chair of the seminar “Islam in the West,” co-sponsored by the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard and the Harvard Law School, and as coordinator of Harvard’s Provost Interfaculty Program on Islam in the West.

Cesari received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Aix-en-Provence in France. She has served as a senior research fellow and associate professor at the French National Center for Scientific Research at the Sorbonne, Paris, since fall 1992.

Founded in 1959, the Liberal Arts Honors Program offers students of high academic ability and initiative a more in-depth and rigorous version of the College’s Core Curriculum. Students are required to take a minimum of six honors courses—normally four courses in honors Development of Western Civilization in the freshman and sophomore years, one or two honors courses in the junior year, and a capstone colloquium in the senior year.