William Miles

William Miles, a professor of political science at Northeastern University in Boston, had considered the selection of an U.S.-born pope a dark-horse possibility as a “theo-political” response to social policies in the United States with which Pope Francis had expressed dismay.

In his book Jews of Nigeria, William Miles, a political scientist at Boston’s Northeastern University, calls the community the world’s first “internet Jews”. 

Twenty years ago, my research into French-speakers in Israel and Palestine seemed like an obscure topic to a lot of friends and colleagues. With the current uptick in terrorist-triggered emigration from France to Israel, it is anything but. There has long been an ambivalent relationship between France and the Holy Land, between French and the […]

Does the triumph of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq herald the undoing of colonial-era boundaries elsewhere in the Middle East and Third World? Are other graves turning than those marked “Here Lies Sir Mark Sykes and Ci-gît François Georges Picot” – those of their partners in partition? It should not be overlooked: Nearly […]

I distinctly recall the moment when I first learned the word boko, now notorious as half the name of the Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram. (“Haram” means “forbidden” or “sinful.”) I was living in a remote, rural borderland straddling the border between northern Nigeria and Niger Republic in the early 1980s, conducting research as a […]

It can be a small world, this niche buying of used scholarly books on Amazon. It can also be a sobering one. I am on the lookout for both rare books in my field and copies of my own publications that are being sold way below list price. The former helps me remain current in […]