A work of true crime and geopolitical intrigue, Ghattas' latest book is the story of what happened when the Iranian revolution collided with the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and how this led to President Trump's Operation Epic Fury against Iran this year. The tale is intertwined with an investigation into the 1984 murder in Beirut of Middle East Scholar Malcolm Kerr, the father of world-famous basketball player and coach of the Golden State Warriors, Steve Kerr. Professor Tarek el-Ariss, chair of Middle Eastern Studies, will engage in discussion with the author. 

This book launch and discussion is free and open to the public. Registration is required. The event will be livestreamed and recorded. 

Kim Ghattas is an Emmy-award winning journalist, analyst, and author with more than 20 years of experience covering the Middle East, international affairs, and US foreign policy for the BBC and other print and broadcast media. She is a contributing writer for The Atlantic magazine and a regular contributor to the Financial Times. She was a visiting professor at Dartmouth College for Spring 2026 and a fellow at Columbia University's Institute for Global Politics in 2024. 

Ghattas is the author of The Secretary, a New York Times best-seller about US foreign policy and her travels around the world with Hillary Rodham Clinton. She also wrote Black Wave, a work of narrative non-fiction exploring the impact of the Saudi-Iran rivalry across four decades and seven countries. Black Wave was named a New York Times notable book in 2020 and has since become a reference for universities and diplomats. 

Born and raised in Beirut, Ghattas served on the board of trustees of the American University of Beirut (2017-2023) and was chair of the board of directors for the Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism network from 2020 to 2023. Ghattas is also a former nonresident senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (2017–2022), a former public policy fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (2017) and a former Civitella Ranieri fellow (2019). 

Ghattas taught with the Middle Eastern Studies program in Spring 2026.

Tarek El-Ariss is the James Wright Professor and Chair of Middle Eastern Studies at Dartmouth College. In 2021, he earned a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete his new book, Water on Fire: A Memoir of War. Trained in philosophy, comparative literature, and visual and cultural studies, he works across disciplines and languages to examine notions of the subject, community, and modernity. His research interests include Arabic literature, culture, and the arts; literary theory, new media, and digital humanities; Nahda and modernity studies; travel writing and the war novel; sci-fi and utopia studies; 18th- and 19th-century French philosophy and literature; and gender and sexuality studies. He is author of Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political and Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals: Arab Culture in the Digital Age, and editor of the MLA anthology, The Arab Renaissance: A Bilingual Anthology of the Nahda.

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The Middle East Initiative is a collaborative effort of the Dickey Center and the Middle Eastern Studies and Jewish Studies Programs at Dartmouth and part of the Dartmouth Dialogues. With generous support from Tal and Ariel Recanati P’21.