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Please note: This event has been canceled due to illness.

March 24, 2015 — John L. Esposito, professor of religion and international affairs and of Islamic studies at Georgetown University, will deliver the annual Towns Family Lecture at Allegheny College at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, April 1 in the college’s Ford Chapel. Esposito’s talk, “The Future of Islam and Democracy after the Arab Spring,” is open to the public.

His presentation is also part of Allegheny College’s Year of Voting Rights and Democratic Participation, which celebrates the 50th anniversary in 2015 of the Voting Rights Act and explores the state of voting rights, broadly defined, in the world today.

Esposito is founding director of the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding in the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown.

He has served as a consultant to the U.S. Department of State and other agencies, European and Asian governments and corporations, universities and the media. He has also served as president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America, the American Council for the Study of Islamic Societies and the American Academy of Religion; as vice chair of the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy; and as a member of the World Economic Forum’s Council of 100 Leaders and the E. C. European Network of Experts on De-Radicalisation.

Esposito has been honored with the American Academy of Religion’s Martin E. Marty Award for the Public Understanding of Religion, Pakistan’s Quaid-i-Azzam Award for Outstanding Contributions in Islamic Studies and the Walsh School of Foreign Service’s Award for Outstanding Teaching.

The Towns Family Lectureship in Practical Ethics was established at Allegheny College with gifts from Thelma and John W. Towns Jr. in 1992, in honor of his mother, Helen Davis Towns, class of 1920. John Towns is an alumnus of the college, class of 1950. The lectureship provides a forum for encouraging informed ethical decision-making among Allegheny students by bringing to the Allegheny campus notable experts on moral choice within the Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions.