Philip Merrill College of Journalism Associate Professor Susan Moeller has been named a 2008 Carnegie Scholar - one of 20 Americans honored by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. She is the first University of Maryland faculty member to be so named. Scholars are selected for their “compelling ideas and commitment to enriching the quality of the public dialogue on Islam.” Moeller will receive a two year grant worth $100,000 along with “intellectual support to well-established and promising young thinkers, analysts and writers.”
Moeller calls the award a “tremendous honor” and says she will use the grant to write a book that will focus on how a wide range of stakeholders including governments, media and even terrorists themselves use the public threat of terrorism to further their own ends. “Reporting responsibly and credibly on the intersection of terrorism and Islam is one of the greatest challenges facing contemporary journalists. In fact we see the importance playing out even in the US presidential election, with the attempts to cast Senator Barack Obama as a Muslim who as a child was educated in a madrassa - the clear implication being that being Muslim is at best ‘bad,’ and going to school in a madrassa is tantamount to signing up to be a terrorist.”
The Carnegie Foundation says this is the fourth year its Scholars will focus on Islam - a total of 91 honored over that time span. The 2008 Scholars are drawn from a number of disciplines and represent public universities, liberal arts colleges and traditional research universities like the University of Maryland. Patricia L. Rosenfield leads the Carnegie Scholars Program. She says, “America’s discourse on Islam will benefit from the Scholars’ enthusiastic quest to transform complex information into useful, structured knowledge. Their superb scholarship is often daring, always accessible and truly public.” Rosenfield said that emerging and established scholars alike are encouraged to orient their writing and speaking beyond purely academic audiences.
The Carnegie Scholars program was established in 1999 to “provide financial and intellectual support to writers, analysts and thinkers addressing some of the most critical research questions of our time.”
Read the UM Newsdesk Q&A with Prof. Moeller.
