The second day of the AUB conference on American Studies in the Middle East was fascinating. Patrick McGreevy, the admirable American director of the Center for American Studies in the Arab Region, has done a wonderful job in attracting attendees from Egypt, Jordan, Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, Algeria, Cyprus (previous spelling error corrected . . . Thanks, commenter dd) as well as from Europe and the U.S. And the conference has been enlivened by the participation of several graduate students in American Studies from the region, including four from the University of Teheran.

In the morning I heard a fine session on American public diplomacy in Lebanon and Iran (the Iranian graduate student who made one of the presentations was particularly interesting), as well as the role of liberal, American-style education in the Middle East — at AUB, the American University of Cairo, and Robert College in Istanbul. It is fascinating to consider the difficulties of bringing a very American notion of undergraduate education to entirely different cultures, and also to cope with the challenges of adapting liberal education to societies in serious transition. The original Protestant mission has disappeared in every case, replaced by a strong commitment to general education in societies in which professional undergraduate education is the norm.

I also attended a lively session on American foreign policy in the Middle East, with papers by Iranians, an American based in Amsterdam, an American based in Birmingham (UK), and a Middle Easterner based in Dresden. You can imagine what a difference the locations and life experiences of these scholars had made to their understanding of the U.S. role in a trouble region, especially at a time when our role in the region is more contested than it has ever been before. And this was also the topic of an all-American afternoon panel on American foreign policy, built around the distinguished University of Virginia Middle East expert Bill Quandt, his admirable journalist-wife Helena Cobban, and two former U. Va. graduate students — this was mainly an attempt to predict where the current presidential candidates might take our country on the question of Middle East policy after 2008.

And the conference concluded with a very subtle lecture by Amy Kaplan of the University of Pennsylvania, who deconstructed the meaning of “homeland security,” focusing on the novel use of “homeland” after 2001, and on the range of new meanings for and practices of “security” since 9/11. She showed how much a literary scholar can have to say about our understanding of political terms and practices.

The Beirut conference has been a positive experience in every way. I learned a lot substantively, I met a group of engaged and interesting teacher/scholars, and I think I may be able to assist U.S. cooperation with American Studies programs in Iran and Palestine. Besides, the weather is wonderful and Beirut is enchanting. I have, I confess, though, heard the words “narrative” and “discourse” more often than I thought I needed to.

Off to Doha, and the Georgetown School of Foreign Service undergraduate program in Qatar. More later . . .