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Award-winning syndicated columnist Mona Eltahawy, a renowned international speaker on Arab and Muslim issues, has been selected as the 2010 recipient of the Anvil of Freedom Award.  The Edward W. and Charlotte A. Estlow International Center for Journalism and New Media will hold a luncheon honoring Eltahawy at the University of Denver on Wednesday, January 6, 2010. 

Before she moved to the U.S. in 2000, Ms Eltahawy was a news reporter in the Middle East for many years, including in Cairo and Jerusalem as a correspondent for Reuters and she reported from the region for The Guardian and U.S. News and World Report. 

She is one of a few writers whose essays appear regularly in both the western and Arab press. Her opinion pieces have been published frequently in the International Herald Tribune, The Washington Post, the pan-Arab Asharq al-Awsat newspaper and Qatar’s Al-Arab. 

In 2006, the Next Century Foundation awarded Ms Eltahawy its Cutting Edge Prize for distinguished contribution to the coverage of the Middle East and in recognition of her “continuing efforts to sustain standards of journalism that would help reduce levels of misunderstanding”.  

She has reported for various media from Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Libya, Syria, Saudi Arabia and China. Ms Eltahawy was the first Egyptian journalist to live and to work for a western news agency in Israel. She reported on the terrorist campaign in Egypt in the 1990s and is familiar with the groups and ideology behind the attacks of September 11, 2001 and others since then. 

She has lectured and taken part in conferences in North America, Europe and the Middle East. In November 2006, she was named Distinguished Visiting Professor at the American University in Cairo (AUC), her alma mater.  

Since she moved to the U.S. in 2000, Ms Eltahawy's views on Arab and Muslim issues have become sought after by producers and college campuses alike. She has been a guest analyst on ABC Nightline and Good Morning America, PBS Frontline, BBC TV and Radio, The Doha Debates, CNN, Al-Arabiya, Al-Hurra, MSNBC, VOA, Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor and various NPR shows.

Mona was born on Aug. 1, 1967 in Port Said, Egypt and has lived in the U.K, Saudi Arabia and Israel and is currently based in New York. She is a board member of the Progressive Muslim Union of North America. She calls herself a proud liberal Muslim and comfortably incorporates into her lectures her experience of wearing a headscarf for nine years. 

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Meeting professors from other parts of the world can enrich understandings, not only of other places, but of practices in the U.S., as well. 

Thanks to funds from the Marsico Initiative and from the Undergraduate Research Center, students heard presentations from Visiting Scholar Dr. Rivka Ribak of Haifa University.  She offered a public presentation titled,  “People of the Book: Resistances to the Media in Israel,”which presented research from a Haifa MA student who explored the practice among Palestinian young women who, going against tradition of their families, acquired cell phones from boyfriends.  She observed that cell phones could provide ways of rebelling, but that these practices weren't always emancipatory, as the young women then were indebted to their boyfriends.  More recently, Palestinian families have become more open to the idea of women carrying cell phones, thus purchasing them for their daughters and potentially cutting out the boyfriend's potential influence.

She also presented research on cell phone use among Israeli teens to a class of more than 30 undergraduates, and provided leadership in an invited symposium that involved undergraduates and graduate students as well as faculty from the University of Denver, University of Colorado-Boulder, and Colorado State University.  The symposium gave undergraduate students an opportunity to discuss research on an even playing field within the context of a group that included their peers up to full professors.

Currently serving as a Visiting Professor at the University of Tennessee, Dr. Ribak is an internationally known scholar whose research focuses on the construction of political and gender identities through the media and the domestication of technologies into homes and into the Kibbutz.  She is a cultural studies scholar whose interdisciplinary ethnographic work has been of interest to those in media studies, religious studies, anthropology, and gender studies. 

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