Clovis Karam
Clovis Karam has a Ph.D. in Scholastic Philosophy & Religious Studies from the Catholic University of Lyon-France (1985), and another Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of Lyon III France (1982). Karam has demonstrated extensive knowledge and research in the fields of Comparative Middle/Near Eastern studies, Semitic religions, cultures, mythologies, and philosophies.
Currently, he is teaching Islamic religion and culture at the Religious Studies Department and AIMES while exploring with talented students the challenges and the paradigms of change facing Islamdom Dar Al Islam today.
Karam is a native of one of the oldest continuous living civilizations of the Levant, Lebanon. His extensive knowledge of Aramaic/Syriac, and standard/colloquial Arabic, is at work while teaching the Qur'an and Arabic at the Modern Languages & Literatures Department at SCU. He is confident that with his creative teaching methods, the fears of learning a dead language are quickly transformed in the classroom to an exploratory field of the archeology of the mind and words.
Karam is the Research Director of the Phoenician Aramaic Research Center and has published recently a trilogy in French on the Phoenician mythology and its impact on the Canaanite/Hebrew religion and culture. As a member of the Society for Ancient Mediterranean Religions (SAMR), he will be presenting his paper, entitled "Sailing with the Gods: Religion and Maritime Mobility in the Ancient Mediterranean World," this summer in Malta.