Kamran Asdar Ali, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Rochester, is co-directing a project on tourism in the Southern Mediterranean supported by the Mediterranean Programme of the Robert Schuman Centre at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy.
The two-year project, with an extension for a third year, will study regional tourism in the Southern Mediterranean in a cultural, historical, and socio-economic framework. Ali and Martina Rieker, assistant professor of history at the American University in Cairo, will coordinate a research team to conduct studies in Egypt, Turkey, Palestine/Israel, and Jordan. The project will hold at least three workshops in the next two years at the European Institute in Florence where researchers will present their work to each other and share it with other invited scholars from the United States, Europe, and the Middle East.
Through the project, Ali and Rieker will initiate a dialogue in the field of tourism studies, which has been neglected in the regional literature on the Southern Mediterranean and Middle East.
Ali is also currently engaged in an oral history project on the trade union movement in Pakistan. In connection with this research, he organized a workshop in December 1999 on Pakistani labor history in Karachi, Pakistan, with supporting funds from the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
A native of Pakistan, Ali holds a degree in medicine from the University of Karachi. He has taught anthropology at Rochester's Department of Anthropology for five years.
Note to editors: Professor Ali is a resident of Rochester.