Lisa Portmess is a Professor of Philosophy at Gettysburg College in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. She earned her Ph.D in philosophy from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.  She first visited the Middle East in 1970 and spent a summer living in Beirut and Saudi Arabia. She later returned for her first year of full-time teaching at The American University of Beirut in Lebanon during its civil war, and has since travelled to Jordan, Syria and Israel as part of her interest in law and society.  In 2006 she was awarded a Fulbright grant to The American University in Cairo in Egypt where she taught Philosophy and American Studies.  She and her family remember fondly the warmth and generosity of the people they came to know in Cairo and the intellectual excitement of the year’s immersion in the life of the city.