Can you tell us about a teacher who shaped your undergraduate or graduate education?
So many! From my undergrad at University of Texas-Austin, one that stands out is my first year English seminar teacher, Michael Adams. The year-long class was on the monotheistic scriptural traditions' and their impact on Western literature. On the first day, he had us go around the room, say our name, and then if and what kind of God/god/gods we believed in: as we introduced ourselves, there were observant and non-observant, believing and agnostic/atheist, Jewish (Reform and Othordox), Protestant (mainline and evangelical), Sunni Muslim, Bahai, Catholic, Hindu, and Wiccan self-descriptions among the fifteen of us. Having grown up in a pretty homogenous (white Protestant) small town southwest of Dallas, the class, from the first day, forced me to work through questions about pluralism, with regard to my own faith and in terms of interacting together in a learning community, that were incredibly impactful. I remember long conversations in Prof. Adams's office that pushed me hard on these questions but also helped me work through them, and how the literature he had us read, particularly Dostoevsky's The Brother's Karamazov, deeply shaped me.
From grad school at Georgetown, I think of Amira Sonbol having us read Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge to critically deconstruct Bernard Lewis' What Went Wrong: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity (at the height of the neoconservative ascendancy and bipartisan Iraq War jingoism); Osama Abi-Mershed's training on the entwinement of the colonial and postcolonial history of North Africa and social theory (from Durkheim to Fanon, Memmi, Gellner, Bourdieu, Foucault, Geertz, Mernissi, etc.); and of my mentor, John Voll, who exemplified an intellectual humility, ethical reflexivity, and profound emphathy in studying the Muslim world, which I was drawn to and shaped by as I completed my doctoral training on the modern history of the Middle East and North Africa through a period in which the United States launched and carried out two post-9/11 neo-imperial wars in the region (2003-2009).
What book or article has recently been on your mind?
N. K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy. My partner, Leslie (the most wide ranging and voracious reader I know!), recommended this African-American science fiction and fantasy author, and I went on a binge over the past couple of months burning through a couple of her series. I'll try to be careful to not give too much away, but the Broken Earth books are set in a millennia distant future in which human civilizations, now spread over a single hemispheric continental landmass, have to survive crazy levels of seismic activity by relying on a enslaved class of people born with the ability to control earthquakes. The series demonstrates the incredible amount of research Jemisin did in seismology, volcanology, geology, plate tectonics, mineralogy, (spoiler alert: astronomy), and climate science, and her incisive meditations on and insights into social structure and the intersections of race, gender, divisions of labor and specialization, modes of production, and climate change. And she does this in a page turner that, at its core, is a deep exploration of the complexities of a mother-daughter relationship and parent-child love!
On a related note, one of my day dreams is to teach a class at Yale called "Fantasy Sociology." We would work through core sociological topics (like social structure, state formation, education, race/ethnicity, gender, bureaucracy, colonialism, nationalism, etc.) by analyzing the empirics from classic fantasy/science fiction social worlds including Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Dune, and others like Jemisin's Broken Earth. I believe this type of blended humanities/social science exploration can really open up our eyes in several directions, including being able to see our own world more clearly.
What are you working on now?
Honestly, much of our time under lockdown has been spent trading off days dealing with child care, trying to keep it together in terms of family life, and getting our three daughters through the end of socially-distanced school! I was able recently, though, to finish off a chapter for an edited volume that comparatively analyzes how Morocco and Algeria, along different paths, have shifted in the past decade from constitutional mono-culturalism (officially privileging Islam and Arabic) to constitutional multiculturalism (recognizing both Arabic and Tamazight, or Berber, as official languages). In both countries, local mobilization and global shifts around indigenous rights discourses created pressures that are forcing both countries to redefine national identity and, albeit slowly, put multiculturalist rhetoric into policy implementation.
More close to home, our country's current reckoning with race and the past and present of U.S. history has me thinking a lot about American national identity as a site of struggle and about the question of my own love and commitment to our country. As a scholar of nationalism, I analytically critique how it works, how it manipulates, how it invents, how it imagines, how it selectively includes and excludes, and for the U.S. how it cloaks forms of colonial and imperial domination. But, I've lately been convicted about a form of my own white privilege in just critiquing this country from my Yale perch or in threatening to move to Canada or Scandinavia in reference to the outcome of an election. Watching the high school students of the Citywide Youth Coalition lead us in a BLM march through New Haven for racial justice, I was hit in the face with the reality that "THIS is America"--the present tense is operative, it is this struggle, it is this engagement, it is this complex mixture, it is these students, it is my daughters' generation, it is all of our interaction with the past and hopes for the future--and that I have a moral imperative to engage in it actively. I certainly haven't figured out what that means, or all that I should do, but at least in terms of writing, I want to work on some public facing pieces that engage this call, not to patriotism or nationalism, but to commitment in solidarity to all those drawn together (by choice or not) into the ongoing struggle that is America.
Can you tell us about one of your best teaching experiences?
The Yale summer session course I have been able to teach seven times in Morocco on the society and politics of North Africa stands out. I love getting to share Morocco with Yale students, to download what we've been able to learn and experience in this part of the world over the past twenty years that we've been going back and forth, and to watch the students engage and experience the country on their own, develop relationships with Moroccan students and families, and have great adventures together in the desert, in the mountains, and in the country's diverse cities. It is a great teaching experience to talk together in the classroom one day then be out on a field trip the next, going to the places we've discussed or meet a local expert to engage questions they have. Probably the most rewarding part of the trip is getting to know the students at a deeper level than is possible during a regular term and watching them develop such strong relationships together as a group over the course of five weeks.