Eliz Sanasarian, Ph.D., a professor of political science at the University of Southern California, will give a presentation on “Beyond Fundamentalism: Private Ideals and Public Policy Around the Globe” at The University of Findlay on Tuesday, Sept. 25, at 7 p.m. in the Alumni Memorial Union Multipurpose Room.

The lecture, which explores the relationship between religion and politics and provides of where religion promoting the public good locally and globally, is free and open to the public.
 
Sanasarian’s presentation is sponsored by the College of Liberal Arts in celebration of the University’s 125th anniversary. A 1975 graduate of The University of Findlay, Sanasarian went on to earn her master’s and doctoral degrees in political science from the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Her areas of research and teaching are ethnic politics, religion and politics, and women and development.  She is on the editorial board of the Religion and Politics Journal of the American Political Science Association, which is published by Cambridge University Press.
   
She is the author of “The Women’s Rights Movement in Iran: Mutiny, Appeasement and Repression from 1900 to Khomeini,” the Persian version of which has just won the best book prize by a group of journalists and women’s rights activists in Iran.  She also has written “Religious Minorities in Iran,” now out in paperback, which The New York Times called “important” and “indispensable” and the Times Literary Supplement (London) referred to as “absorbing … rare and valuable.”
   
A professor at the University of Southern California since 1985, she also has been a visiting scholar at Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies and has received several awards and grants, including a Pew Charitable Trusts Faculty Research Grant in 2005. She also received with three other faculty members a major grant for 2006-2009 from the United States Agency for International Development for capacity building of the indigenous local non-governmental organizations that work with orphans of AIDS in Kenya.

Sanasarian has received several awards for her teaching and mentoring of students at the University of Southern California.  Her publications have appeared in many academic journals, including Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Diaspora, Natural Resources, Journal of Developing Societies and the Journal of International Affairs.