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Welcome from the Dean
I would like to welcome you to the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, and thank you for giving me this opportunity to introduce you more fully to the rich, creative world of the school of which I am more than ever immensely proud to be the dean.
Throughout its more than 90-year history, AUC has balanced a strong commitment to liberal arts education in English, with a concern for the region’s needs for practical applications and professional
specializations. HUSS, being the largest school at The American University in Cairo, encompasses eight departments, as well as two language institutes -- the Arabic Language Institute and English Language Institute.
HUSS offers students a liberal arts education, interaction with faculty members within an environment where these scholars are leaders in their fields, thereby allowing our students to get the best of both worlds. More>>
John Verlenden's essay "The Effect of Homemade Bombs on the Composition Process" just came out in Writing on the Edge, a peer-reviewed journal "on writing and teaching writing" out of UC-Davis: Volume 22 Number 1 Fall 2011: 35-40.
The essay ranges over an 18-year period, during which time Verlenden taught for 11 years at the American University in Cairo. During this time terrorists from two groups sought the undermine the country from 1992-1997 with attacks on the police and on foreigners, culminating with the well-known mass murders in Luxor. While Verlenden was teaching writing, he noticed that students avoided writing or discussing the attacks even when they were instructed to do so. On returning to the country after 8 years in the USA and Jordan, as a Fulbright lecturer, the author discovered that his Egyptian students knew little about this earlier traumatic period, which suggested a societal avoidance that involved their parents' generation. When the Egyptian revolution occurred, the author discovered that many students still preferred not to confront the experience, even though it was widely interpreted as a positive development, at least at first. He concludes that the teaching of writing on currently relevant topics has its limits. These limits have to do with cultural shocks and mass denial in the face of potential pain and, to a degree, shame and confusion. His experience during the early terrorist events suggested that many faculty, both Egyptian and American, also retreated into various forms of denial.
John Verlenden is a writer who has made his living by teaching writing at LSU, University of New Orleans, and American University in Cairo. While on a Fulbright lectureship, he introduced the writing workshop to Jordan University of Science and Technology and to University of Jordan (along with Daniel Vilmure, formerly of Rhet/Comp Dept at AUC). His stories, poems, articles, essays and reviews have appeared in journals and magazines. He is also co-translator with Ferial Ghazoul (AUC Department of English and Comparative Literature) of two literary works, one of which won the Arabic Translation Prize at University of Arkansas in 1997. He and Ghazoul won a NEH grant in 2010 to translate Majnun and Layla, an updated version of the 7th-centure poem, by living Bahraini poet Qassim Haddad. They have also translated a selection of his complete poems. Some of these translations appeared in Banipal and Al Ahram.
For more information about the essay please contact jverlenden@aucegypt.edu
or tel:2615.1628
Bruce W. Ferguson to be Distinguished Visiting Professor
The Institute for the Arts and Humanities at Penn State University has invited Dean Bruce W. Ferguson as its annual Distinguished Visiting Professor (DVP) during the first week of April 2012 to offer four public lectures. Ferguson is Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Science at The American University in Cairo. He will discuss issues of Literacy and post literacy in an environment of proliferating images and virtual technology, pre-revolutionary Egyptian Contemporary Art, the critical role of the catalogue in art exhibitions and recent curricular changes in arts teaching and learning in institutions of higher education.
To read more about the lectures please click on the following link: HUSSNews.aspx
An Abstract from the article " Islam, the media and why an MP's career took a nose dive" Written by Dr. Mohamed Tabishat, Anthropology Professor at AUC.
"Apart from further pitying the evidently pitiful behavior of a
supposedly respectable man, what can one make out of this story? What
can one say about the tradition this man represents, and which is
represented by the media as a host of high morals? Furthermore, what
does this incident report about the overall society within which the
man, his party, his parliament, and the historical tradition that has
supposedly shaped his behavior live and operate? Are these elements
independent of each other? Are they all independent of the overarching
moral economy at work not only within political Islam but other
ideological positions?"
To read the full article click on the following link:
Islam,-the-media-and-why-an-MPs-career-took-a-nose.aspx
An Abstract from Al Ahram Weekly about Mad Forest
"The play started and we were all at once plunged into a succession of short, flashing scenes that flitted across the stage with dizzying rapidity, giving us no clue as to who the characters were or what to make of them. To add to the mystery, 8 of the 16 first scenes were played in complete silence, and in the rest, the dialogue was so cryptic, elliptical, opaque, or artificially contrived as to tell us very little. The first half of the performance was muffled in baffling silence -- a kind of eloquent, teasingly suggestive silence that seemed to reach into the depths of memory and speak volumes. It seemed to me then that 'Mad Forest', the main title of the play, was not just a metaphoric name for Bucharest as a city that 'stands on land that used to be an impenetrable forest, known to the horsemen of the steppe as Teleorman (Mad Forest)', as one performer explains, but, indeed, a metaphor for the structure of the play and its import and an apt description of one's impression after seeing or reading it for the first time."
To read the rest of the article click on the following link:
cu211.htm
"Contemporary Art and the New Egyptian Identity"
Shady El Noshokaty
is giving a multimedia lecture and performance titled "Contemporary Art and the New Egyptian Identity" at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. It explores the relationship between pre-and post-revolutionary Egypt, its transformation and the importance of young artists in this change.
For more information, please check the following link:
contemporary-art-and-new-egyptian-identity
"The tragedy behind the fire of Institut d' Egypte"
by Khaled Fahmy, historian and chair of the history department, AUC
"And so when I arrived in Tahrir Square in the evening and saw the fire, the only thing I was thinking was that we have lost what is more valuable than the books of the Institut d’Egypte. Although I specialize in the 19th century history of Egypt, and though I was aware of the importance of the books that were being burned before my eyes, there is nothing more precious than human life, and the lost lives of the martyrs day after day in Tahrir Square are more valuable than those burning books, no matter how rare or expensive they are."
To read the complete article in Al Masry Al Yom, please click on the following link: 581726
Clem Henry Receives Lifetime Achievement Award
Professor emeritus honored by Middle East Studies Association
Clem Henry has received the 2011 Mentoring Award from the Middle East Studies Association (MESA). Henry, government professor emeritus, retired this year and is now chair of the political science department at American University in Cairo.
to read more about this please check the following link: 4478.
"Waqf: Held In Trust"
By Pascale Ghazaleh
Held In Trust is an edited work. Gazaleh wrote the introduction, selected and edited the chapters, which are contributed by several scholars in a seminar organized by the department of Arab and Islamic Studies (ARIC) in 2005 at AUC, “The Uses of Waqf: Pious Endowments, Founders, and Beneficiaries.”
"Three Stories from Cairo"
by Gretchen McCullough
A book about how funny and quirky life can be in Cairo
The School of Humanities and Social Sciences is proud to announce the publishing of Rhetoric and Composition Senior Instructor Gretchen McCullough's "Three Stories From Cairo" book. This is a bilingual publication with short stories in English and translated into Arabic.
Burying the Beloved: Marriage, Realism and Reform in Modern Iran
By Amy Motlagh
Burying the Beloved traces the relationship between law and literature in Iran to reveal the profound ambiguities at the heart of Iranian ideas of modernity regarding women's rights and social status. The book reveals how novels mediate legal reforms and examines how authors have used realism to challenge and re-imagine notions of "the real." It examines seminal works that foreground acute anxieties about female subjectivity in an Iran negotiating its modernity from the Constitutional Revolution of 1905 up to and beyond the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
Realizing Freedom: Hegel, Sartre, and the Alienation of Human Being
By Gavin Rae
Gavin Rae, visiting assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy has released a new book, Realizing Freedom: Hegel, Sartre, and the Alienation of Human Being (Palgrave Macmillan: 2011). He is the author of numerous journal articles on various figures (Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Marcuse) and themes (ontology, ethics and faith, aesthetics, and social relations) in the history of post-Kantian philosophy. The book provides a comparative analysis between Hegel and Sartre.
To read more about these books please check the following link:
HUSSNews.aspx
Newsletters and Publications
Bruce W. Ferguson, dean of HUSS, has contributed to the Catalogue of Ahmet Öğüt Exhibition Once Upon A Time A Clock Watcher During Overtime Hours through an article titled On Laughing At Works Of Art. The exhibition took place at the Fondazione Guiliani Per L'Arte Contemporanea in Rome.
To know more about the exhibition or read Dean Ferguson's article, please click on the link below:
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Don't Miss Our Associate Dean's Lecture on Sunday May 6, 2012.
"Is Religion Natural? David Hume on Human Nature and Religious Belief"
Nathaniel Bowditch, Assistant Professor, Philosophy Department
3:30- 5:00 pm
Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud Building PO71, AUC New Cairo
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One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
A Play by Dale Wasserman
Based upon the Novel by Ken Kessy
May 2,3,9,10 at 7pm
May 5,8 at 5 pm
For tickets and information please call
012.2172.1526 or pva@aucegypt.edu
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For a calendar of HUSS events please click on the below link
http://www.aucegypt.edu/huss/Pages/HUSSEvents.aspx
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