Kelly Shannon, director of Florida Atlantic University's Peace, Justice and Human Rights Initiative (PJHR),
was invited to write an article to provide advice for the incoming Biden Administration regarding U.S. policy toward the Muslim world. The piece,
published online by the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs at Georgetown University
, is titled
“Women's Human Rights and U.S. Relations with the Islamic World: Advice for the Biden Administration" and can be found here
Women’s Human Rights and U.S. Relations with the Islamic World: Advice for the Biden Administration
.
The Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs was founded within Georgetown's Office of the President in 2006 to address the nexus of religion and global affairs at an institutional level. Shannon was one of four experts asked to write articles in the area of "Rethinking U.S. Engagement with Global Muslim Communities."
Shannon
is Associate Professor of History and the Chastain-Johnston Middle Eastern Studies Distinguished Professor of Peace Studies at FAU. She has been involved with PJHR since its inception in 2014 and was an inaugural faculty fellow. PJHR’s mission is to work toward “developing and sharing the best practices for promoting tolerance and understanding of diverse cultures.”
Shannon specializes in the history of U.S. foreign relations with a focus on U.S. relations with the Islamic world, U.S. relations with Iran, Muslim women’s human rights, transnational history and human rights. Her first book, "U.S. Foreign Policy and Muslim Women’s Human Rights" (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) explores the integration of American concerns for women’s human rights into U.S. policy towards the Islamic world since the Iranian Revolution.
Shannon is the winner of the 2019 Stuart L. Bernath Lecture Prize awarded by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. The Bernath Lecture Prize recognizes and encourages excellence in research and teaching by a younger historian (under age 41 or within 10 years of earning the Ph.D.), and prior winners have gone on to become leading scholars in the field. As part of the award, Shannon delivered the lecture, “Approaching the Islamic World,” at the SHAFR luncheon held at the American Historical Association annual conference in New York City in January 2020, and her lecture was published in Diplomatic History in June 2020.
