International Center
An educator, author, and inspirational academic leader for many years, Father Jim Heft has made unique contributions to American higher education. He has published and edited eight books and written over 150 articles and book chapters. He has also been a nationally recognized leader in cross-disciplinary faculty development work. As a Marianist, he has been deeply involved in the leadership of Catholic higher education in the United States, serving on the board of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities (ACCU) for nearly a decade, and chairing that board from 1999-2001. Along with three other leaders in Catholic higher education, he founded Catholic Education: A Journal of Inquiry and Practice in 1996. He is the recipient of four honorary degrees.
After finishing his doctoral studies in historical theology at the University of Toronto, Father Heft spent many years at the University of Dayton, a Catholic university founded by the Marianists. There, he served as chair of the Theology Department for six years, Provost of the University for eight years, and then Chancellor for ten years. He left the University of Dayton in the summer of 2006 to work on the foundation of an Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies at the University of Southern California, where he is currently Alton Brooks Professor of Religion and President of the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies.
Recent publications of the Institute include Passing on the Faith: Transforming Traditions for the Next Generation of Jews, Christians and Muslims (Fordham University Press, 2006) and Beyond Violence: Religious Sources of Social Transformation in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (Fordham University Press, 2004), both edited by Fr. Heft, who is currently also editing Learned Ignorance: the Limits of Knowing, which contains papers that grew out of a week?s meeting in Jerusalem in 2007 among Jewish, Catholic and Muslim Scholars and Catholicism and Other World Religions, which contains major papers and critical responses of a series of lectures held on USC's campus during the 2007-2008 academic year.
Fatima Sadiqi is president of the Centre for Studies and Research on Women, director of the graduate unit "Gender Studies," and Professor of Linguistics and Gender Studies in the Department of English at Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University, Fes, Morocco . Her areas of research include women and gender studies, Islam, and language. She is the author of four books: Images of Women in Abdullah Bashrahil's Poetry (Arab Institute for Research and Publishing, 2004); Women, Gender and Language in Morocco (Brill Academic Press, 2003); Grammaire du Berbčre (L'Harmattan , 1997); and Studies in Berber Syntax (Konigshaussen and Neumann, 1986). She is co-author and editor of a number of volumes, among them Women Writing Africa (Northern Region, vol. IV), Feminist Press, 2009. She has written numerous articles in Moroccan and international refereed journals including her latest, "Morocco's Veiled Feminists," published in the online journal, Project Syndicate. Professor Sadiqi writes and lectures in English, French, and Arabic. She is also involved in promoting Berber, the indigenous language of Morocco, and is co-author of the first textbook on teaching Berber in Moroccan schools.
As a Fulbright scholar, Dr. Sadiqi has conducted research at Washington University (summer 1991), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (summer 1999), Lasell College (spring 2004), and Rutgers University (summer 2005). She has organized four international conferences: "Feminist Movements: Origins and Orientations" (1999), "Women and Development" (2000), "Women and Education" (2003), "Mediterranean Women" (2004), and "Mediterranean Women and their Rights" (2005). She is involved in various Moroccan and international associations and networks fighting violence against women. She has also served on a wide variety of national and international committees, such as the Language-Based Area Studies Initiative for China, Japan, Eastern Europe, and the Arabic Speaking World (United Kingdom).
