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Please join us for the 2025 Dabney Adams Hart Lecture: "From #OscarsSoWhite to Oscats: Race, Species, Middle East on the Oscar Awards" by Dr. Natalie Khazaal. Dr. Natalie Khazaal is an associate professor in the School of Modern Languages at Georgia Tech and the director of the Arabic and Middle East & North Africa programs. She is also an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) fellow for her work on Arab atheists. Dr. Khazaal studies how disenfranchisement, media, and language affect each other and has focused on Lebanon, atheists in Arabic-speaking communities, refugees, and non-human animals. Her book, Pretty Liar: Television, Language, and Gender in Wartime Lebanon (Syracuse UP, 2018), is the only study that explores the role of audiences in the development of media legitimacy during violent crises with a focus on Lebanon. Her publications on speciesism in the media—including her co-edited volume on borders and the displacement of human refugees and nonhuman animals, ‘Like an Animal’: Critical Animal Studies Perspectives on Borders, Displacement, and Othering (Brill 2020)—have received international recognition in Spain, Turkey, Australia, Canada, and the US. She has contributed to the topic of atheism with publications on the use of pseudonyms by Arab atheists, on how gender affects the way Arab atheists approach television, and on the embedded atheism in Mohamed Choukri’s literary oeuvre. 

Dr. Khazaal has taught classes on Arab culture, media, and globalization that develop students’ critical thinking, curiosity, and cultural tolerance at Georgia Tech, Georgetown University, UCLA, Carleton College, Middlebury College, and Texas A&M. She is currently teaching the course, ARB 295, Arab History and US Military on Film.

The Dabney Adams Hart Distinguished Visiting Humanities Professorship Fund was established in 2003 by Madeline and Howell E. Adams, Jr. in honor of his sister, Dabney Hart '48. This fund welcomes visiting scholars to campus in a variety of topics and disciplines.