Professor Amy
Kallander - Department of History
In past three years, you have offered eight courses on
different topics related to the Middle East? Do you have a favorite one? If yes, why?
I teach a couple of different types
of classes, HST/MES 318 and 319, which offer a survey of the Middle
East from roughly 1300 to the end of the 20th century,
and a range of thematic
and special topics courses about the Middle East. Even in the courses that I’ve taught
more than once, I am constantly changing the syllabi, both in response to students’ interest and to incorporate recent scholarship.
For instance, in 2011, I started
developing a new course about
the Arab Spring,
parts of which
drew upon my own research about the blogosphere and the Internet, as well as conversations with colleagues who work in media studies.
The course con-
sists of case studies of Tunisia,
Egypt, and Libya, and to a lesser extent Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain,
combining in-depth engage- ment with their recent
histories and prominent debates about the role of social media
and the question
of foreign intervention. I teach another course
on popular culture
in the Middle East where we watch movies,
talk about sports,
and listen to different genres of music from Algerian rai, to Palestinian hip hop, to the Egyptian
legend Umm Kulthum,
using culture as a way to
understand the daily life of people in the region.
Students often find similarities in the lives of Middle
Eastern youth who play
soccer, listen to music, and tweet in the same
way as in the US.
Much of the time, I ask for student
input about which topics and readings they find particularly appealing. In response
to one such conversation, I am now teaching a course on Iraq, where we reconstruct the modern history
of Iraq through the lens of
Iraqis. The course focuses on issues that are new to most American students, such as the strong labor
movement or the role
of educated women as a progressive force.
Overall, I hope to present a picture that suggests regional
similarities as well as national
particularities that indicates the com- plexity of Middle
East history, but also the many similarities with other global
regions.
Do you think your courses have helped students to develop a
better and more informed understanding about the region? How?
The Middle East
does not figure
prominently in most
high school curricula, and as the
only faculty member
in history who specializes in the region,
most students have little prior exposure
to Middle East history
in an academic setting and sometimes
think that wide historical and cultural chasms
separate Americans from people in the Middle
East.
As I mentioned earlier,
they are often
pleasantly supersized to find commonalities between the life of youths
in the Middle
East and their own lives. When they watch music videos,
read blogs, or learn about Iranians’ love for soccer,
they find resonation with their own experiences. Once in class we watched
a movie about young Iranian
girls who were infatuated by soccer players. For some of the students it was a very familiar
scene, similar to American teens and their
infatuation with celebrities and athletes.
Of course, many of the sources
are scholarly and textual, and we try to bring these into conversation so that hip-hop
lyrics or a presidential proclamation are a reflection of political ideologies, socio-economic change, and geopolitical situations.
And
finally can you tell our readers a little bit about your own research?
My first book is a social
history of women
and the family
that governed Tunisia when
it was a province of the Ottoman
Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries. It tries to situate Tunisia in terms of the scholarship on other Ottoman
Arab provinces, the imperial center
in Istanbul, and early modern
court culture more broadly.
Since then I have turned to the modern
period, writing about the Internet in Tunisia,
and I am currently working
on a project on transnational youth culture during
the global 1960s, and gender and women in postcolonial Tunisia.
We also asked one of
the students to share her thoughts and experience about Professor Kallander and
her courses.
Heather Round a senior majoring in Middle Eastern
studies, has taken two classes
with Professor Kallander. Heather told us the following: “One on the Arab
Spring and one on Iraq,
and they were
two of my favorite classes
during my time
at SU. I think what
Kallander does well
is to never reduce an issue or event to something bit sized. She provides a complex, multi- layered, and realistic overview
of different actors and developments. . This helps to rationalize all the parties
involved so the perspective you cultivate is well rounded
and complex, as opposed to constructing an easy bad guy and blaming one person
or administration or a set of events. Also,
a lot of the readings
and sources we use in her classes
are produced by people
who were or are in the region.
For example, in the class
on Iraq, we read books
written by Iraqis,
blogs created by Iraqis,
art produced by Iraqis, and documentaries with Iraqis sharing
their own narratives and insights. So it doesn’t feel like some
abstract, academic surveillance. It is an analysis informed
by local opinions
and rooted in reality. We have a lot of discussion
and there is room in Kallander’s classes
to ask fundamental or tangential questions and really grapple with many different factors and events. The purpose doesn’t
seem to be feeding you knowledge and information that you are expected to reiterate later perfectly for
an exam, but
to realize the richness and
depth of the region and
its history and its issues.