NCID-1180
Samer Ali
Associate Professor of Middle East Studies, Director, Academic Program, Middle Eastern and North African Studies, International Institute and Director Academic Program, Department of Islamic Studies, International Institute, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts
University of Michigan
Education/Degree:
1 Arabic Literature (Indiana University)
About
I am currently an associate professor in the U-M Department of Near Eastern Studies. Before arriving at the University of Michigan, I taught at the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) and at The Free University in Berlin. While at UT Austin, I served as graduate advisor in Middle Eastern Studies where I raised $500,000 to fund the education and research of the 42 graduate students I recruited. Among those students, 12 met UT Austin’s diversity criteria, meaning women and minorities burgeoned in the department from zero to 29% over four years. I am particularly dedicated to mentoring women, minorities, and first generation graduate students.
Current Work
In my scholarship, I am often boggled: What seems like cultural understanding amounts to misunderstanding? As George Bernard Shaw notes, “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” I’m interested in documenting these breakdowns and positing alternative approaches. I have published two volumes, co-edited The CALICO Journal: Special Issue on Hebrew and Arabic and authored Arabic Literary Salons in the Islamic Middle Ages: Poets, Public Performance and the Presentation of the Past, which is the only Anglophone study of Arabic salons in medieval Islamic culture. The book introduces performance theory to classical Arabic studies, illustrating how people enjoyed literature in their everyday lives, while forming friendship, falling in love, venerating the holy, and having fun. In doing so, they adjusted the tradition in each setting, thus invigorating the literary canon.