Paris terrorist attacks

In the aftermath of the Paris terrorist attacks, a number of UC Berkeley faculty are available to address a range of related issues. The faculty members are listed alphabetically, with an explanation of their expertise.

Asad Q. Ahmed
Associate professor of Arabic and Islamic studies
Email: asad.ahmed@berkeley.edu
Media Relations contact: Kathleen Maclay, (510) 643-5651 or kmaclay@berkeley.edu

Expertise: Contemporary Islamic religious and political thought, early Islamic social and religious history and post-classical Muslim intellectual history.

M. Steven Fish
Professor of political science
Phone: 685-7794 (cell)
Email: sfish@berkeley.edu
Media Relations contact: Kathleen Maclay, (510) 643-5651 or kmaclay@berkeley.edu

Expertise: Fish is an authority on religion and politics, political regimes and more. He is the author of Are Muslims Distinctive? A Look at the Evidence (2011), which reflects the first major scientific effort to assess how contemporary Muslims and non-Muslims do and do not differ. Using data drawn from around the globe, Fish found that while democracy is rarer in the Muslim world, homicide rates and class-based inequities are less severe among Muslims than non-Muslims. Fish has been interviewed about what happened in Paris and the Muslim community by numerous media outlets, including CNN and Al Jazeera.

Jack Glaser
Associate professor of public policy
Phone: (510) 642-3047
Email: jackglaser@berkeley.edu
Media Relations contact: Kathleen Maclay, (510) 643-5651 or kmaclay@berkeley.edu

Expertise: Racial profiling. He is the author of a new book, Suspect Race: Causes and Consequences of Racial Profiling. He has been interviewed by BBC World News about racial profiling in the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks.

Charles Hirschkind
Associate professor of anthropology
Email: chirsck@berkeley.edu
Media Relations contact: Kathleen Maclay, (510) 643-5651 or kmaclay@berkeley.edu

Expertise: Religious practice, media technologies, emerging forms of political community in Europe, the Middle East and North America, and contemporary developments within Islamic traditions. Hirschkind has been working on a project in southern Spain, examining current impacts of Europe’s Islamic past, including how it affects Europe’s Christian identity. He is the author of the award-winning book, “The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (2006),” about the popular Islamic media form—the cassette sermon.

Saba Mahmood
Associate professor of social cultural anthropology
Email: smahmood@berkeley.edu
Media Relations contact: Kathleen Maclay, (510) 643-5651 or kmaclay@berkeley.edu

Expertise: Religion, secularism, law and politics, ethics, Islam, the Middle East and Europe. Mahmood has written about the Danish cartoons of Mohammed that stirred controversy in 2008 in an article published in the journal Critical Inquiry, focusing on the meaning of the cartoons for many Muslims and the kind of offense it caused. The article became part of a 2010 book that she co-authored on the subject. Mahmood also is author of a book, Politics of Piety (2005).

Stephen Maurer
Adjunct professor of public policy, director of the Information Technology and Homeland Security Project at the Goldman School of Public Policy
Email: smaurer@berkeley.edu
Media Relations contact: Kathleen Maclay, (510) 643-5651 or kmaclay@berkeley.edu

Expertise: Terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, biosecurity, homeland security, and innovation economics. Maurer was in France at the time of the terrorist attacks.

Ed Wasserman
Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism
Office: (510) 642-5492
Email: ed.wasserman@berkeley.edu
Media Relations contact: Kathleen Maclay, (510) 643-5651 or kmaclay@berkeley.edu

Expertise: The ethics, evolution and ownership of the news media. He writes a media column that is distributed nationally and internationally on the McClatchy Tribune wire and carried by numerous news outlets.