Tag Archives | NYU

New Friends in the Desert

January 30, 2010

I’m back in Abu Dhabi for another Candidate Weekend. As I did during the November Candidate Weekend, I gave a 75-minute class on “Cosmopolitanism Now,” which resulted in a very lively discussion about the nature of cosmopolitanism and both opportunities and problems that a cosmopolitan perspective presents. The group I had was every bit as impressive as the one I had in November (ten of whom will be attending NYUAD come fall).

The candidates spent their afternoon looking at sample rooms in the Sama Tower, where NYUAD students and faculty will live,  before visiting the Marina Mall. Having seen the mall during my last visit, I opted instead for a walk back to the hotel along the corniche, conversing with a colleague and enjoying the lovely weather.

The highlight of the day, once again, was the trip to the desert, where we stopped at a camp outside the town of Al Khatim. Upon arrival there was the now obligatory run up to the top of the sand dune (I let one of the students beat me to the top) …

followed by some bonding in front of the fire and over dinner.

And making the acquaintance of a mother camel and her baby. [Click on the continuation link below for more camel pictures.]

If you were there on the desert trip, leave a comment and let us know what you thought of the evening — or any aspect of your visit to Abu Dhabi.

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Manic Monday

January 28, 2010

And not “just another” manic Monday. In fact, I can’t remember another day on which I’ve had to give three big public performances — and on different subjects to boot (though in my mind there are significant areas of overlap among them).

9:30 a.m. — First up, a Writing New York lecture on on E. B. White’s Here is New York, introducing the week’s theme of “History, Modernity, and Nostalgia.” In fact, the interplay among these three ideas will turn out to be a major area of exploration as the course unfolds, and Monday’s lecture serves as a kind of second overture for the course after the introductory lecture last week. I’ve described the lecture over at Patell and Waterman’s History of New York, and I did last year, I introduced the discussion by telling an anecdote about Hillary Rodham Clinton invocation of White’s book during her debate with Rick Lazio during the 2000 campaign for the U.S. Senate seat from New York.

2:00 p.m. — American Literature I, Lecture Two. Luckily, this lecture belongs to my comfort zone, because I decided this year to frame the course with Moby-Dick. So this lecture was an introduction to Melville’s life and writing and the opening sections of Moby-Dick. The students had been asked to read the “Etymology” and “Extracts” sections that open the book and the land chapters (1-22) to get their feet wet as it were. Lecturing about Moby-Dick has become a little bit like playing in my band used to be back in the day: I look forward to certain solos and riffs, but also to varying them in event.

6:30 p.m. — A panel on “Multiculturalism or Cosmopolitanism” for the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute as part of a year-long series on “The Cosmopolitan Idea.” Sharing the stage with two of your intellectual heroes –  this case the intellectual historian David Hollinger (UC Berkeley) and the cultural critic Walter Benn Michaels (University of Illinois at Chicago) is bound to be a little bit … disconcerting. The two of them, in their different ways, hover over my recent work on emergent literatures in a kind of good cop-bad cop routine. (Guess which is which.) I offered a preview of the event PWHNY over the weekend, and later this week I’ll write about each of their talks individually (and maybe my own). Some video excerpts will eventually appear on the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute website. (You can see the entire first session in the series there now.)

Needless to say, my brain felt more than a little bruised come Tuesday morning.

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NYUAD Candidate Weekend

November 27, 2009

nyuad_classroom.jpg10:00 AM

Eid Mubarak! Back home it’s Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, the first day of the Christmas shopping season, but here, in Abu Dhabi, it’s the Eid Holiday, which commemorates the willingness of the prophet Ibrahim (PBUH) to sacrifice his son Ismail for God”s sake. Despite the fact that I hate traveling over Thanksgiving weekend, I find myself here in the new downtown campus building of NYU Abu Dhabi, awaiting a group of applicants who have been flown here from all parts of the globe as part of the “November Candidate Weekend.”

Outside, it’s summer weather: a lovely 85 Farenheit, though rain is predicted for Sunday night! As we walked into the building, we passed a group of men who were finishing up the ritual sacrifice of what looked like a lamb (which is one way that Eid is celebrated here). That was upsetting one of my colleagues, who’s an animal rights activist, and I suspect the candidates will be taken around the other side of the building, in case any of them are not quite ready for that aspect of Islamic culture.

I’m thrilled to be here. After my last visit I was trying to figure out a way to get myself invited back sometime next term, so when the invitation came to take part in the Candidate Weekend, it seemed like too good an offer to pass up. (Luckily, my wife agreed!) The past year’s work has been about building a curriculum and a faculty, but my colleagues on the Arts and Humanities Coordinating Group haven’t had a chance to get a sense of what the students are actually going to be like. I’ve observed them, last night and at breakfast this morning, and they are indeed an amazing bunch. So I’m looking forward to watching them think like cultural critics from 75 minutes. Our subject? What else, but cosmopolitanism!

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Teaching Philosophy circa 2004

November 6, 2009

Last Wednesday I participated in a panel discussion on the subject of teaching large lecture courses sponsored by NYU’s Center for Teaching Excellence. My co-panelists were Jim Matthews, who teaches psychology, and Daniel Stein, who teaches physics. Jim set forth a series of generally applicable principles of good lecturing; Dan spoke about the special challenges facing the lecturer in science and, in particular, physics; and I spoke about my approach to lecturing in a humanities classroom.

As a way of preparing for the session, I dug out a “Statement of Teaching Philosophy” that I had occasion to write five years ago and then revise two years ago. I was pleased to see that I still agreed with most of what I wrote. Here’s how it began:

My goals as a teacher have always been to make my students understand why I feel passionate about literary study and scholarship, to help them explore the contours of the discipline and its modes of thinking, and to awaken within them a sense of the pleasures and rewards of intellectual life.

What I want my undergraduate students to take away from my courses is not so much the memory of any particular text or piece of analysis, but rather a fuller appreciation for the value and, indeed, the joys of the life of the mind. I want them to realize why reading and thinking about literature should become an abiding part of their lives, and I want to give them the tools that will make their future reading experiences rich and rewarding, in college and beyond.

In my graduate teaching, I have sought to instill a professional approach to literary study, while also making my students understand that their training should help them engage more fully with the world, rather than remove them from it. Above all, I want my graduate students to understand the power and responsibilities that they themselves will have as teachers.

[If you're so inclined, you can download a PDF (98KB) of the entire statement here.] I realized, however, that one word that has become crucial both to my scholarship and my pedagogy was nowhere to be found in the statement: cosmopolitanism.

So I’m planning to update that statement in the near future. It’ll address the pedagogical implications of recent theories of cosmopolitanism. I’m interested in the ways that cosmopolitanism has emerged as an alternative not simply to nationalism but also to the kind of universalism that reduces all people to some common denominator in order make generalizations about humanity. As I keep saying to whatever audiences are willing to listen: for the universalist, difference is a problem to be overcome; for the cosmopolitan thinker, however, difference is an opportunity to be embraced. Cosmopolitan theory stresses the importance of being willing to engage in meaningful conversations across boundaries of identity and of disciplinary thinking. One concept from recent cosmopolitan theory has provento be particularly useful in a classroom setting: “fallibilism,” the idea that we need to listen to others and to be willing to have our minds changed because we are all fallible.

Announcing at the outset of the class that you subscribe to a doctrine of fallibilism at once establishes your authority and sets productive limits on it — and helps you save face if you happen to make a gaffe during lecture!

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Al Ain

October 23, 2009
al_mezyad_01.jpgThe Al Mezyad Fort in Al Ain

Thursday morning, we headed out to the oasis city of Al Ain, about two hours east of Abu Dhabi, near the border with Oman. There we were met by Brian, an ex-pat who heads up the Emirates Natural History Group, which is interested in both the archeology and ecology of the Emirates. Brian was an incredibly knowledgeable guide to  these aspects  of the region, and he had suggested that, rather than take the typical museum and oasis tour of the city, we focus on the Al Mezyad Fort and the Hafit tombs, which (as he’d written to us in advance) “may be inaccessible soon as development plans for the area proceed.” Our time was limited, because we had a 2:00 meeting with Deans and faculty from the United Arab Emirates University. Looking at those two sites proved to be an ideal excursion, because they were satisfyingly off-the-beaten track and got us out into the desert, away from tall, ultra-modern buildings.

al_mezyad_02.jpgTo get to the Mezyad fort, we turned off the main road and drove up to a closed gate. Visiting the site, while not exactly discouraged, is apparently not exactly encouraged. The fort itself is an early 19th-century structure in the Portuguese style (blocky, with three round towers and one square one) that has been extensively restored — it’ll be torn down and redone at some point, if they can get the Afghan builders who know how to do mud brick properly and if the site isn’t turned into a luxury bed-and-breakfast.

al_mezyad_03.jpgMeanwhile, some pieces of the restoration were carried and used to finish the restoration of the larger Al Jahili fort, built in 1898 by Sheikh Zayed the First (“the Great”) and the venue this weekend for the New York Philharmonic’s concert. We walked into the small living quarters, similar to the one in which the founding president of the UAE, King Zayed bin Sultan al Nahyam, lived as a child. Not exactly the lap of luxury. Brian stressed for us how recently it was that the population of Abu Dhabi lived in conditions that were primitive and how historically the population was always in danger of starvation due to the scarcity of food and water. Standing on the ramparts we could see the distant hills that made the location of the fort a chokepoint: the old  camel route had to come between these two sets of mountains meaning that those who possessed the fort could levy taxes on trade.

Reaching the Hafit tombs at the foot of Jawal Hafit took a little bit of off-roading (we borrowed the 4×4 that belonged to the Associate Dean for Humanities at UAEU, who would be our host later in the afternoon). A the foot of the mountain, we saw three reconstructed tombs — the ones you see in brochures and guidebooks. Also, apparently, incorrectly reconstructed.

hafit_tombs_reconstructed.jpgReconstructed Hafit Tombs

Brian showed us what an unexcavated tomb looks like: basically a pile of rocks, due to the fact that the tombs had been looted in antiquity and subjected to the sands of time (literally). No wonder then that so many were bulldozed during the search for oil in the area. Nevertheless, at other similar sites, there are apparently a multitude of unexcavated tombs — and they’re likely to remain so until someone is willing to spend the money to excavate a past that doesn’t produce golden treasures.

hafit_tomb_unreconstructed.jpgUnreconstructed Hafit Tomb

Standing amidst these tombs, probably 3,500 to 4,000 years old, we were vividly struck by a  sense of the region’s past. These are the kinds of experiences we hope that NYUAD students will be able to have — indeed, we’re hoping that some of the will actually be able to work on archeological sites and help the region recover its ancient history.

We saw some camels too. Our guide had a lot to say about the state of the camel farming industry: apparently, unless your a fast, and therefore prized, racing camel, it’s not much fun to be a camel. The ones we saw weren’t the most regal specimens, and their feet were bound to prevent them from taking long strides and running away. My French Department colleague tried to make friends, but since we weren’t giving them food or water, the camels weren’t much interested in us.

camel_al_ain.jpgWe had lunch with colleagues from United Arab Emirates University, which is funded by the federal government and is a research institution. One of the things that we realized in the course of meeting with faculty from  American University of Sharjah, Zayed University, and UAEU is that these institutions have something that will be in relatively short supply at NYUAD: Emirati students. It’s our hope that we’ll be able to partner with these institutions so that their students and ours can interact in educational settings, thereby providing the students at NYUAD a chance to make local, as well as “global,” connections.

We didn’t make it to the famous Al Ain Oasis. Next trip.

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