Guest lecturer's topic: Iraq conflict

Steve Negus will discuss "Iraq: A Civil War Averted, or Interrupted?" at 8 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 18, in the Faculty-Staff Club, Case Center. Admission is open to all.

The talk, part of the Greenberg Middle East Residency, is sponsored by the Office of the Dean of Special Programs.

Negus,who has covered Iraq since 2004 and has been doing research on the insurgencies, will explore what he sees as the main causes of the Iraqi civil war. For the past year he has been a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, conducting research on the Sunni insurgency in three localities in Iraq.

He lived and worked as a journalist in the Arab world for the past 15 years and in 1997, helped start the Cairo Times, which at the time was one of the region's few genuinely independent news magazines in any language. In 2003 he moved the focus of his work to Iraq, working at first as a freelance writer, then as a trainer and editor for the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, an organization that taught Iraqis the basics of journalism and helped them cover events in their communities.

From 2004 to 2008 Negus worked full-time for The Financial Times and The Economist, reporting from Baghdad and the immediate environs.

He earned a B.A. degree in political science at the University of California, Berkeley.