Winter 2014 newsletter

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Winter 2014Volume 15Issue 1

Inside this Issue

Class of 2017

3 Welcome to English Class of 2017

4 An English Summer

15 Scholar at Risk: Qais Akbar Omar

18 Faculty Profile: Marina Bilbija

20 Werner Sollors

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Harnek GulatiKathryn GundersenRachel HarnerAverill HealeyReuben HowardMiriam HuettnerGabriel HurwitzKathy JungEmma KantorRobert KimClarissa KleinTyrik LaCruiseAlex LeeHalie LeSavage

Joan LiMax Masuda-FarkasDan MilaschewskiNicolas O’ConnorNancy O’NeilHope PattersonShelly PrezaCatherine QinBrad RiewChristopher RileyHannah SaalNina SapersMichael SavareseEli Schleicher

Natalie AntunezJocelyn ArndtGeoffrey BinneyAislinn BrophyGianna CacciatoreAllegra CalderaTaylor CarolCaden ChaseMonica de los ReyesStergios DinopoulosLena FeltonJessi GlueckSilvia GolumbeanuAlexandra Grimm

Dear New English Concentrators,

Great choice! Everyone in the English Department – the faculty, the graduates who will be teaching your sections, and the administrative staff – welcome you to the department. We’re all certain that the choice you’ve made will repay manifold interest not only for the rest of your Harvard career, but for the rest of your life.

Why are we so sure? Three reasons: (1) we know you love reading and talking about books; you have immense pleasures ahead of you!; (2) statistical likelihood tells you that you’ll derive enormous satisfaction from this concentration (English is routinely at or near the top of concentrations of 50 or more concentrators for student satisfaction); and (3) our own vocation is in part to transmit a deeply informed literary culture to you: we very much look forward to having you in our classes!

On behalf of the entire department, I extend the warmest of welcomes to our concentration,

James SimpsonChair

Obasi ShawMaia SilberMark SteinbachZara SternbergMadi StineGwen ThomasLaila Virgo-CarterMia VitaleChloe VolkweinTom WaddickJarrod Wetzel-BrownNatalia WojcikSarah Yeoh-WangFaye Zhang

Photo by Henry Vega Ortiz

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Welcome to English Class of2017

“In my freshmen year, I was taking two math/science courses when I realized I liked reading literature much more than solving computational problems. I even missed writing papers, which really surprised me (for I swear I hated them in high school). So I decided to shift my focus to English, where I could learn about fiction from different viewpoints, discuss topics that are fascinating, and be with professors who are just as enthusiastic as I am. In English I can enjoy college with subjects that I loved rather than enduring certain courses in order to get a specific degree. I like all my classes (which I almost thought not possible), and I am excited to take even more courses and to start my Junior tutorial.”

— Laila Virgo-Carter

“I chose the Harvard English Department because they know how to make a student feel comfortable. I know that is a strange word to use in an academic

setting, but I believe that we are all trying to find ourselves here at college, and sometimes it can be uncomfortable when we do not find ourselves right away. The English Department understands that we are all learning, growing, and discovering exciting new things about this world and our lives within it, and they are right there alongside us for the journey. Their guidance is invaluable in our search, and I believe that the department is a welcome friend that we travel alongside while here at Harvard.

The English Department houses much more than mere books. I believe that the English Department teaches its concentrators far more than how to simply enjoy and respond to books. We all love reading, but the department also teaches us that the words fostered within the pages of any story are not nearly as important as the fairy tale that inspired it. The events and experiences of our lives are what make them valuable, and the department gets that. This is what drew me to the department, and, as cliche as it sounds, I believe the English Department is the first major part of the “fairy tale” I am writing everyday that I live.”

— Jarrod Wetzel-Brown

Why I Chose English

AN ENGLISH SummerKEEPING UP WITH CONCENTRATORS OVER SUMMER BREAK

Photo by Henry Vega Ortiz4

AN ENGLISH SummerKEEPING UP WITH CONCENTRATORS OVER SUMMER BREAK

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A man with white hair pulled back into a ponytail approached our table. He wore circle dark-rimmed glasses and a wide grin. “Hello, I’m Mr. Yeats,” he greeted us in an Irish accent, shaking our hands. This was one introduction we never expected when we planned our trip to Ireland. It was, however, the perfect way to kick off our celebration of Yeats Day—the 149th anniversary of William Butler Yeats’s birthday—in Sligo, Ireland. We were about to embark on a breakfast boat tour around Lough Gill with the Sligo Yeats Society, which was comprised of local scholars and poetry enthusiasts who were all native to Ireland and much older than us. We soon learned that the Mr. Yeats we met was a local Yeats expert who turned a small profit by inviting people to his home, serving Edwardian dinners, and impersonating the poet by reading verse and talking about his life history.

Our fellow passengers welcomed us warmly to the Yeats Day celebration, at which we partook in tea, scones, and collective poetry recitations. We met Brian, a reporter for the Irish Times, Stella, the head of the Sligo Yeats Society, and Oona, an older woman who gave a touching rendition of “The Ballad of Father Gilligan” from memory as she swayed to remain upright in the gently rocking boat. It seemed like this small contingent had been keeping Yeats’s words alive for the past century and a half. “Everything important in Yeats’s life was decided over tea,” Stella explained to us, sipping from her mug, when we told her about our literary interests. As we took mental notes on the nearby sites she urged us not to miss and the book titles she most recommended, we wondered if her dictum about Yeats

Thesis Research

Becky Gould ‘15 and Ginger Marshall ‘15

Becky Gould ‘15 and Ginger Marshall ‘15 pose with “Mr. Yeats,” the W.B. Yeats impersonator in Sligo. It was a rainy Yeats Day!

Photo of Benbulbin in county Sligo, Ireland by Ruby_Tuesday321 courtesy of Flickr6

might apply to us, too, as we collaboratively contemplated how our Yeats Day experience would be formative of our senior thesis thinking and writing. Our Yeats Day excursion in Sligo was only one of the many literary anecdotes that we could recount from our travels in Ireland through the English Department Summer Thesis Research Fellowship last June. For her critical thesis on visual art in the poetry of William Butler Yeats, Becky was attending Yeats Day events, visiting art museums, and viewing archival materials. Ginger focused her research on Dublin, where she went to meet and write about the Dubliners celebrating Bloomsday, the annual celebration of James Joyce’s Ulysses, though she did end up gaining inspiration from Becky’s Yeats excursion. She talked with many Dubliners and was impressed to find how eager they were to discuss the effects of the novel on their lives and their city—or to discuss any Irish writer, for that matter. Some highlights of her Joyce research were attending a reading group at Sweny’s Chemist, venturing to the cliff at Forty-Foot to view the setting of one of Joyce’s chapters, and feeding seagulls on the River Liffey.

To our surprise and delight, our research led us to some of the same destinations in Ireland. When we went on a Bloomsday walking tour of Sandymount (following a breakfast of kidneys, blood sausage, and roasted tomato!), we paused in front of Yeats’s birthplace. When we trekked to Sligo on the west coast for a celebration of Yeats’s birthday, we attended a talk by contemporary poet Paula Meehan, who addressed the role of literary giants—including both

Yeats and Joyce—in local and national identity. When we met Irish folks throughout our travels and told them about the purpose of our trip, we were consistently met with the retort, “A Yeats scholar and a Joyce scholar who get along?” Joyce and Yeats met several times during their lives, and there was certainly a one-sided rivalry as Joyce tried to navigate his way to the top of the Irish literary totem pole. Yeats had more of a hold over the Irish psyche and for a longer, less controversial period of time. Today, one is more likely to find Yeats’s poetry in classrooms than Joyce’s Ulysses but Joyce has a strong, rebellious influence on modern Irish hipsters. It is said that the first time Joyce met Yeats—when Yeats was already an established poetic genius, and Joyce had only published a few short stories and under-appreciated plays—Joyce said to Yeats, “We have met too late. You are too old for me to have an effect on you.”        With that kind of history, we somehow felt compelled to reconcile “our” writers’ rivalry. When biking around Sligo or strolling through Dublin’s old streets, we would studiously pull out our respective tomes and share passages with each other about the sites we saw. Our conversations evolved into considerations of the merits and shortcomings of Joyce and Yeats, and the notable differences in how they are each celebrated in today’s Ireland. It was through our conversations—with each other and with the many friendly Irish people we met—that we came to appreciate more of the history of modern literature in Ireland. Our trip was as enjoyable as it was literarily illuminating!

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I worked as the features intern during the summer of 2014 for the Los Angeles Times. For 10 weeks, I hopped around many sections of the newspaper, covering a variety of stories: a 53-year-old woman running 500+ miles in Death Valley, a "water cop" hired in LA to combat the state's extreme drought, a normal workout routine for a typical UCLA "gym bro," and a new suburban development trend that builds neighborhoods around sustainable farms rather than golf courses. I did a mix of blogging and longer print stories, which landed me in the fashion, home, food and health sections. I also made it to the cover of local news, entertainment (Calendar), and to the front page of the newspaper (A1). The professionalism of the editors and the freedom they gave me in developing my ideas made working for the Times an incredible experience. Every story involved strict reporting and a certain craftsmanship with the wording of each sentence. It was simply invaluable. And, not to mention, a lot of fun.

dashyoung-saver.blogspot

Dashiell Young-Saver ‘16

Dashiell Young-Saver reporting from Death Valley, covering an Ultramarathon athlete running 500+ miles. Outside temp: 122 degrees. The runner's team gave him a surprise spray-down.

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Photo courtesy of Dashiell Young-Saver

Internships and Vacations

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This summer I volunteered with an organization called WorldTeach, an education nonprofit which sends volunteer teachers overseas for summer and year-long programs. I was stationed in Poland, where I lived with three different homestay families, wrote and taught ESL curriculum in two different towns, and visited major urban areas and tourist sites with other volunteers. I highly recommend WorldTeach for anyone who is 1) considering a career in education, 2) wants to make a real, felt impact on the world around them and 3) is looking for a deeply immersive overseas adventure: living with homestay families means lots of summer bike rides, family dinners, camping trips, language learning, and even (in my case) a Polish wedding extravaganza! WorldTeach is a wonderful organization, based right here in Cambridge: I’d highly recommend checking them out as you’re researching summer opportunities.

This summer, I volunteered as the Developing and Marketing intern for the NYC-based nonprofit literary organization Poets & Writers. With the help of a travel stipend from the organization, I commuted into Manhattan for two days each week to help organize donor records, send out donor gifts, research potential donors and current members, write author blurbs, and learn the company's nonprofit database software. In addition to learning about the way Poets & Writers works as a nonprofit and as a magazine-publisher, I was able to speak with various members of the staff to learn about the company. I especially value the tips I received on the publication and publicity for the organization's bimonthly magazine, given my involvement in the Harvard-based arts publication Tuesday Magazine. In my free time I worked as a lifeguard at the local pool and met up with high-school friends.

Over the summer, I worked at HBO in the Los Angeles office. I worked in the Original Programming department—my job was primarily to read and cover scripts that were submitted to HBO.

Kate Massinger ‘16Bridget Irvine ‘16

Matt Wardrop ‘15

Photos courtesy of Kate Massinger Photo: Summer Memories by ArTeTeTrACourtesy of Flickr10

Living in Genoa was like living in a dream. I would wake up with the three sets of French windows in my bedroom thrown open to the sun and the salt air and wave to the old man tending to his rooftop garden in the building next to mine. Then I would pop down to the little bar down the street from me and knock back a hyper-strong espresso, Italian-style (standing up, hot coffee stinging my throat, chasing it with a shot glass of icy sparkling water—in and out in under 30 seconds) and grab a cornetto to go on my way to class. At the half-way point in my four-hour daily lesson, there was always a coffee break—either to the alley-cloaked café down the street with the best cappuccinos you’ve ever tasted, or, if I was lucky, to the little beach neighborhood of Boccadasse, 15 minutes away by bus, for a slightly more leisurely cup of espresso. After class, cooking lunch in my apartment or going to a hilltop restaurant for a plate of handmade pasta and delicious pesto (invented in Genoa!). Throughout the day, listening to Puccini, reviewing verb conjugations, speaking to as many locals as possible—constantly absorbing the language I was trying to learn in five short weeks. Everything had a slower pace in Genoa. Besides the strictly timed morning coffee ritual, time was a little more fluid. At first, my deeply ingrained German sensibilities balked at the possibility that a meeting time could be “vague” but eventually I learned to relax. I still saw the people I needed to see, and did the things I needed to do, without keeping a strict eye on the clock. Lunches stretched longer, walks extended further, drinks lingered later, and I could feel the knot that’s been lodged at the base of my neck for years unfurling like a white flag—I surrendered. The poet Erica Jong once wrote, “What is the fatal charm of Italy? What do we find there that can be found nowhere else? I believe it is a certain permission to be human, which other places, other countries, lost long ago.” And after learning Italian with the “Study in Italy” program in that absolute gem of a city this summer, I couldn’t agree with her more.

I spent this past summer working in real estate private equity at a global investment bank in New York City. While many might be surprised at such a summer given my choice in concentration, the lessons I have learned in my English classes here at Harvard were instrumental in helping me receive an offer to return after graduation. Not only did my experience writing help when helping to hone memos and craft investment theses, but my experiences in tutorials, seminars, and sections prepared me well for the vigorous daily debates at work. All in all, this summer cemented my belief that the English concentration is not only intellectually rewarding, but also tremendously versatile.

This past summer I interned at the Wylie Agency, an international literary agency based in NYC whose clients include Dave Eggers, Salmaan Rushdie, Elizabeth Gilbert, Philip Roth, Hilton Als, and Al Gore, among others. Being one of just two interns in a small office, my responsibilities varied greatly from reading new manuscripts and writing reader's reports to helping draft contracts. My favorite part of the internship was getting the opportunity to submit a story that I loved by one of Wylie's clients to The New Yorker. The internship was a wonderful introduction to the business side of trade publishing through the point of view of the agent. It was a truly amazing experience!

Matt Isner ‘15

Rosie Putnam ‘15

Zoë Burgard ‘16

Photo: Summer Memories by ArTeTeTrACourtesy of Flickr

Photos courtesy of Zoë Burgard

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I spent my summer as an associate consultant intern in Bain’s Los Angeles office. As a Chicagoan and English concentrator, everything about the experience was new, exciting, and challenging. During my free time, I had fun befriending the other interns and exploring LA. At work, I felt engaged and motivated by my team as I worked on a cool strategy case in the music industry. Throughout the summer I felt that the learning never stopped, and while the business knowledge was new, the skills in communication and presentation I have acquired as an English concentrator were well utilized.

Tomi Adeyemi ‘15

Photo courtesy of Tomi Adeyemi12

This past summer I interned at Innosight, a strategy innovation consulting firm co-founded by Harvard Business School professor Clay Christensen. The transition from analyzing the presentation of angelic forces in Milton’s Paradise Lost to advising one of the world’s leading oil companies was surprisingly seamless. I realized then the benefits of being an English concentrator; excellent analytical and communication skills are particularly helpful when considering a career in consulting. My usual routine consisted of early morning meditation, learning from and engaging with some of the best consultants in innovation strategy, sunset runs along the Charles, falling in love with yoga, failing miserably at cooking edible dinner, reading Poe or going for dance parties; shuffle and repeat. Weekends were particularly fun. A bunch of us would go on impromptu road trips that would inevitably get us lost in cornfields, we’d kayak, attend the surreal WaterFire festival near Brown, and gorge on tremendous amounts of home-cooked Greek food, all while listening to the Beatles.

And to top it all off—I spent the last two weeks in Thailand eating copious amounts of Thai Red Curry and petting a tiger.

Casi Karunaratne ‘15

Photo courtesy of Casi karunaratne 13

Photo by Henry Vega Ortiz14

In a small room with bare walls, empty, aside from the furniture, Qais (pronounced “Kice”) Akbar Omar fills the space with the scenery of his words. With a pleasantly buoyant manner of speaking, he describes life in his home country of Afghanistan: the tall mountains, the poetry contests, the carpets. He also paints a picture of his life now, in the United States, where he’s discovered Huckleberry Finn and Frank Sinatra. He adds what the blank room is missing: a sense of depth.

The author of A Fort of Nine Towers, a memoir about his life as a refugee during the Afghan civil war and Taliban rule, is now a Scholar at Risk Fellow at Harvard University, where he is hosted by the Department of Comparative Literature and housed by the Department of English. The book gained media attention in 2013, with positive reviews from publications such as The Boston Globe and The New York Times Book Review. Because of the book, and a few editorials he wrote in The New York Times, going back to his home country, for now, means trouble.

Scholars at Risk (SAR) at Harvard is part of an international network of institutions that gives a home to academics who face danger in their home country. In the words of Scholars at Risk program director Jane Unrue, fellows come to Harvard “to be free and to live and work without fear.”

“Harvard SAR has provided sanctuary to dozens of professors, lecturers, researchers, writers, and other intellectuals and artists who are at risk,” Unrue wrote in an e-mail. “By supplying year-long academic positions to excellent and accomplished scholars in need, Harvard SAR helps scholars to escape dangerous conditions and to continue their important work.” SAR fellowships are supported by the Radcliffe Institute and the Office of the Provost, and occasionally from the Scholar Rescue Fund (IIE). Contributions are also made from departments, centers, and institutes within Harvard.

Approximately four scholars are selected each year by the SAR committee. So, how did Omar become one of them?

Scholar at Risk Qais Akbar OmarBy Alexandra Koktsidis

Colorado and beyond

“OK…for that, in Afghanistan when someone asks you a question, we just don’t tell the shortened story, you give them the full story,” Omar says. “So I’ll give you the full story.”

It begins in 2007, when he came to the United States for the first time as a visiting scholar at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he researched chemical-free and organic materials for his family’s carpet business, Kabul Carpets. The second oldest of seven, Omar is the fourth generation of his family in the carpet trade.

“I see myself as a carpet businessman, that’s how I was brought up. I never thought of myself to be an author,” Omar says. After Boulder, Omar went back to Afghanistan, and worked for various organizations, all centered on finding ways to improve his family’s business.

When he wrote what would become A Fort of Nine Towers, it was for therapy. “It was not something I wanted to publish,” he says. “It was just to get everything out of me because sometimes, I would wake up in the morning, or in the middle of the night with these dreams haunting me and left me shattered for days, weeks and sometimes months.” Once he started writing, he could not stop.

He shared what he had written with a few friends, and they encouraged him to publish, sending him long messages listing the reasons why. He asked permission from his family first, and on the condition that names would be removed, his father gave his approval.

In August 2012, Omar enrolled in the business program at Brandeis University, but stopped shortly after finding it a little more finance-based than he would have liked. Soon after, word got out that he was publishing his book. As reviews rolled out from The New York Times and The Washington Post, the news traveled overseas, and people back home took an interest in Omar. Strangers would come into his family’s carpet shop, asking to see him, shake his hand, or take him out to lunch. Omar’s parents advised their son to stay in the United States. He recalls them saying, “People probably think you are very rich now, and we don’t want you to be kidnapped, and then asked for ransom, and go through all that.”

Since he’s been living in the U.S., he’s missed two of his sibling’s weddings, and his mother’s funeral.

After Brandeis, Omar reached out to several universities, seeking an academic home. At Boston University, his story caught the attention of the then Director of B.U.’s Creative Writing Program, Professor Leslie Epstein. “I asked him to send me a sample of his fiction,” Epstein

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page. In this case, he doesn’t force it. “If it doesn’t come, it doesn’t come,” he says.

“I go out, normally I go for a very long walk, two, three hours, in a park somewhere, and then I call a friend and then I go have lunch, or dinner, and socialize.”

When it comes to creative fiction, everything he writes has an element of truth. “I have a hard time creating characters out of nothing.” he says. “So all my characters are based on people that actually exist.”

What keeps him motivated? “Not too many Afghans who lived through the Soviet occupation, five years of civil war, the Taliban, and American invasion have written about Afghanistan,” Omar says. “Over the past 14 years, a library of books has been written about Afghanistan, but most of them by foreigners, who don’t understand everything about our culture, custom, and our values. I feel that voice is missing.”

And though he didn’t foresee the risk, for him, it’s worth it.

When he’s not writing, Omar is designing carpets. Though his family’s shop is currently closed, it’s

said. “He did. I thought it grand, and invited him over for tea.” Though it was mid-year, the school moved Omar into the program, where he earned his MFA in creative writing.

In class, Epstein describes Omar as, “an idiosyncratic critic, often making us break out laughing, but a fine friend to his peers, and, as I knew ahead of time, a truly fine writer of fiction—full of feeling and humor and insight into his own people and others as well.”

He recommended Omar to Scholars at Risk at Harvard, which Omar applied to. On the same day Omar applied to a fellowship at Brown University as a back-up, he received an e-mail from Jane Unrue, accepting him for the SAR Fellowship. “That day, I was so happy,” he says. “I didn’t know if I was walking on the ground, or on the clouds.”

Arriving at Harvard

“When I came here, the first thing I wanted to do was go to the library.” Omar recalls a distant, but close memory of when he was a child, sitting with his sister watching TV before dinner. A cartoon of a young boy who visits Harvard Library would air. So when Omar came to Harvard, with that memory in mind, he took a tour of Widener Library. He not only got to see the stacks, but also, the library archives. “I knew that it was big, I knew that they had books from everywhere, but I had no expectation of seeing so many books from Afghanistan,” he says.

Writing about Afghanistan is something that he plans to do during his SAR fellowship. Currently, he is working on a book that starts in 1960s. “Everyone asks ‘What was Afghanistan like before everything?” he says, referring to the sequence of events beginning with the Soviet invasion in 1979. This book follows a family through that history. For now, Omar says he prefers working in his apartment.

He wakes up when it’s dark—six o’clock in the morning. “As soon as I wake up I listen to the news about Afghanistan, for half an hour, while I am brushing my teeth, using the bathroom, preparing my breakfast. And then I set my breakfast next to my computer and I start typing. And I work for as long as I have, as long as it’s flowing. As it is coming. Because you wake up, you are fresh,” he says.

Sometimes he can write for an hour, other times, a full day. Sometimes, he wakes up and can’t put a word on the

Photo by Henry Vega Ortiz16

something that is a part of him. He’ll listen to music, and envision patterns, colors, and new designs. And he always listens to classical music, with few exceptions.

“I just found this great musician you have in your country, Sinatra?” Omar says.

“He is so good!” he exclaims, and continues: “At least I understand the words he is saying… why people don’t make that anymore? It’s just so beautiful, you listen to it, you feel even good about yourself, you feel rich—not just rich in a sense that you feel good about yourself—you even feel rich, as if you are in a fancy place, you’re in a good environment, and you’re surrounded by educated and smart people.”

He also loves to read. “Gosh, in this country, you have so many bookstores!” he says; it’s one of his favorite things about Boston. He’s read Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov. When he finds an author that “captures his imagination” he won’t stop until he’s read everything. He enjoys Charles Dickens, Jack London and the Egyptian Nobel prize winning author, Naguib Mahfouz: “I have read every single word by that man – his short stories, his novels, his plays.”

One of his favorite authors is Mark Twain. He first read Huckleberry Finn at Boston University. What he likes about Twain is that he incorporates humor in his work, something Omar tries to do as well. “Humor makes you read a lot of things,” he says. As part of his studies at BU, Omar took a Global Fellowship and traveled to the states where Twain traveled and worked: Missouri, California, Connecticut, Nevada.

Even though the roads confused him at first, Omar has grown fond of Boston’s rich cultural life. “It’s very quiet, and you don’t hear about it all the time, but if you just do a little bit of digging, there is so much going on,” he says. Even at Harvard, “you could probably go watch three plays tonight if you want to!”

New York City makes him think of Superman, but overall, is overwhelming. “Too many buildings, too many people, too many cars,” he says, and “a little smelly.”

Of all the places he’s visited in the U.S., Boulder, Colorado is his favorite, with its “tall mountains and all the trees growing everywhere. Since I grew up around the

mountains,” he says, “wherever I go, those mountains are my landmarks.” It reminds him of home.

Memories of home

It’s called a poetry contest, Omar explains: you turn off all the lights and the TV. A candle is lit the middle of the room, and family members and guests sit around it. One person starts by reciting two lines of poetry from a poet of their choice—it may be Rumi, it may be Hafez— the next responds with two lines from a different poet, and so on and so on. “And this goes on for two, three, four hours. Nobody wins, that’s the beauty of it.”

It’s one of the memories and traditions that brings him back to his life in Afghanistan. He Skypes with his family often, and has even tried to participate from his apartment, with the lights off and the shades drawn.

People don’t know about traditions like this, Omar says. He doesn’t deny the accuracy of the American media, but the news of violence, bloodshed, suicide bombers, and the Taliban, has become routine.

“Imagine this wall is a big painting,” Omar says, motioning towards the blank wall in his office. “Just showing a small corner of that painting,” he says, “and telling people it represents the whole painting is not true.”

“There is a lot more to a country,” he says. “The culture, the customs, the people, the hospitality. The handy-crafts we have, the geography of the country. There’s so much to tell.”

And it’s not about writing a book to change the world. “I don’t think on that scale,” Omar says. “If I can change one person’s perspective about my country, or help one person understand my country better, whether it’s the interviewer, or the reader, that’s enough.”

“I don’t think of myself as a writer,” he continues. “I think of myself as a carpet businessman, or carpet producer, or carpet maker, carpet weaver, carpet designer—all of those things. Writing is on the side. If I can help anyone understand my country, and Afghan as a nation better, that is enough! And we have a saying in Dari: ‘Drop by drop makes a river.’ So you know, maybe I’ll one day make a river.”

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Faculty Profile

What does teaching Harvard undergraduates mean to you? What do you hope your students take away from your courses? What does teaching mean for you? What has most surprised you about Harvard?

I come from a long line of teachers, so for me teaching is more than just an occupation. This means that I view my work extends beyond the space of the classroom to both formal and informal modes of mentorship. While I love class discussions and group work, I think some of the most important teaching happens in office hours when you are trying to coax out an argument out of a student paper, or even just sitting with a shy student and getting them to share their observations on a text in a less public setting. What I really like about Harvard students is how eager they are to come to office hours and bounce ideas off of me. I have had students who just came in to chat and check in. And they don’t just do idle chatter. They come in with a barrage of questions: how I chose my field(s), how I selected my dissertation topic, why I decided to go into academia…This has been a very pleasant surprise; it speaks to certain type of confidence and intellectual curiosity here that I really appreciate.

What was the path that led you to your research? Is there anything in your cultural or personal background that drew you to this? What have you discovered about yourself and others through your studies?

The project I am working on now focuses on failed utopian anti-racist campaigns of the late nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Much of the thinking behind this project is shaped by W.E.B. Du Bois and C.L.R. James’ revisionist histories of Reconstruction and the Haitian Revolution respectively, which are similarly concerned with questions of failure. Given that I was born in Yugoslavia, a country that viewed itself as a Socialist utopia and cited “brotherhood and unity” as its official ideology it is not altogether unusual that I should be so captivated by failed utopian programs that preached “universal brotherhood” and inter-ethnic amity. I myself only became aware of these connections when asked why we should pay attention to these largely forgotten anti-racist archives, given that they had no “lasting legacy.” I would argue that this is the

wrong question to ask, because it seems to presume that there is a consensus on what constitutes a “lasting legacy” and that there is a metric according to which relative success can be quantified. At what point are the effects of a social movement or formation no longer considered ephemeral and are accepted as lasting and meaningful? How and where do we draw this line? I have had similar debates about Yugoslavia with people who characterized the fifty years of its existence as a failed experiment. These conversations about inevitability and failure in the Yugoslav context have alerted me to the blind spots of critical approaches that treat historical subjects as naïve and dismiss particular structures of feeling as “false consciousness.”

My motivation for studying unrealized programs and failed utopian projects is to show the contingency of particular historical moments and thus highlight the array of alternatives that were available to historical actors. Some of the questions that I bring to these archives are: what types of worlds were imaginable from this particular perspective or moment? What were the conditions of their possibility; and why are they are unavailable—if not unimaginable to us today? These questions are of central concern to Africana and Postcolonial Studies because they allow us to re-frame our conversations about colonization, self-rule, and the putative failures of decolonial nationalisms away from historic inevitability.

You also have an interest in fashion. What about fashion piques your interest? How does it intersect with your academic pursuits? Do you plan to teach another class in fashion? What about teaching fashion in a design school setting differs from teaching in the English Department? Funnily enough, I have inherited both my academic inclinations and my preoccupation with fashion from my mother, who is a linguistics professor and one-time teen fashion consultant. As a teenage girl she worked for a Yugoslav Women’s magazine as a fashion agony-aunt of sorts. People would write to her to ask which styles and cuts suited which body types best and would consult with her about outfits for special occasions. I think she even sent some of the readers customized sketches of prom dresses! (This was still the era when people had dresses made by seamstresses). But my conversations with my mother often extended beyond aesthetic concerns. I remember her telling me about her generation’s excitement about the miniskirt and everything that this new skirt-length symbolized. I have always been fascinated by the ways in which certain fashion trends index shifts in social norms. The great thing about being trained in programs like English and Africana studies is that

Q & A with Marina BilbijaHarvard College Fellow

Photo courtesy of Marina Bilbija18

they give you the critical vocabulary with which to discuss the semiotics of clothing. Thanks to Cultural Studies and Material Culture Studies we have a robust analytical framework for discussing the symbolic meanings attached to certain trends as well as the histories of textile production, innovation and trade. In courses that focus on questions of race and difference, conversations about sartorial performances of identity are especially valuable since they yield discussions of cultural appropriation, and more specifically, the mainstream appropriation of black and “urban” fashion.

In 2012 I taught a course entitled “Fashion, Race, and Identity” at Drexel University which examined the relationship between sartorial self-fashioning and racial identity from the antebellum era to the present day. We read historical documents about slaves subverting their masters’ authority by stealing and wearing their clothes and traced the enduring fascination of nineteenth and early-twentieth century Anglophone writers with the figure of the black dandy. As you can see, the issues that we focused on were not that different from those we might study in an English classroom; we talked about the problems of representation and mediation and analyzed the endurance of certain tropes and figures. If I could teach this course again, to English majors rather than design or engineering ones I would incorporate more literary texts. Late nineteenth-century literature is rife with examples of racial passing and racial drag, so much of which relies on sartorial performances. For example, one the key scenes of Mark Twain’s Puddn’head Wilson involves the villain donning his black servant’s clothing and murdering his aunt in this racial disguise. These scenes are so teachable because they showcase the paradoxical understandings of race in nineteenth century America, and highlight that identities are performed and honed rather than inherited.

English 90hv When Harlem was in Vogue: Seminar

This course will examine the aesthetics and politics of the first Modern African American cultural movement, known today as the Harlem Renaissance. In our readings of key literary texts by authors such as Alain Locke, Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, Eric Walrond, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Nella Larsen, and Jean Toomer, we will discuss both the national and global contexts of so-called “New Negro Writing” and focus on debates surrounding representation, “respectability” and racial authenticity.

Spring Course

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Professor Werner Sollors smiled as he sank back into a blue couch in the warmly lit, wood-paneled Thompson Room. At least 120 of his former students, colleagues, and friends were with him, listening to the speaker at the podium: “There was almost an Oprah-like quality to Werner’s class—everybody gets a dissertation!”

The speech was one of many delivered at “Keywords in American Literary Studies,” an event held on November 1 at the Barker Center, honoring Sollors’ scholarship and academic career. Arranged by the Department of English and the Department African and African American Studies, it featured four panel discussions followed by an evening reception. Sollors, a professor in both departments, has been a Harvard faculty member since 1983. Currently on Sabbatical, he will be retiring in June.

“I feel like I owe my entire life to him,” said panelist Brian Hochman, a former student and current English professor at Georgetown University. “He’s an extraordinary mentor, teacher, and scholar.” Coming to this event was “like a family reunion,” he added.

Like Hochman, many speakers were former students who traveled across the country and overseas to attend. They not only shared academic papers, but also personal anecdotes and reflections.

“All of them showed a lot of appreciation for Werner as their friend and teacher,” said Joseph Harris, Harvard English professor emeritus and longtime friend of Professor Sollors.

“I sat next to Werner, I saw him take notes, I saw him laugh,” said Glenda Carpio, Harvard Professor of English and African and African American Studies. Sollors served as her mentor, and co-taught a taught a class with her. “We are carrying on [his] legacy with our students,” Carpio added. Jessica Dorman (Harvard, ‘96), a former Sollors student traveled from New Orleans for the event. “I think this brings to life what scholarship is at its best,” she said.

“It was moving for me of course,” Sollors said when we caught up with him in his sunny, book-filled office in the Barker Center. “Especially, they gave such wonderful papers.”

Usually, he will hear from students for letters of recommendation, or when they’re passing through town – which, for Sollors means Venice for part of the year. “They’ll be in Italy, they’ll write me, and we’ll get together in Venice and have a drink or something,” he said.

Sollors taught both undergraduates and graduate students, and in 32 years, has most certainly enjoyed his time teaching.

“We are so spoiled with students, such wonderfully selected students,” Sollors said. “So when you go into a class, you just open a book, the discussion already starts.”

He loves seeing students change their mind about something, or see things in a new way. “They hate Hemingway, and at the end of the class they may not hate Hemingway,” Sollors explained, “or, they really love something that they might have second thoughts about, or learn to look at a work of literature more formally, and think of, ‘what’s the power of an omniscient narrator?’ and things like that.”

One of his fondest memories is taking the Harvard Shuttle bus with his Hemingway seminar to the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum to a room on the top floor, “with all of Hemingway’s books, his manuscripts, with a tiger that he killed, and some wallets, and bullets, and all kinds of tchotchkes.”

On campus, Sollors is especially fond of Widener library. He described a time while he was a PhD student at the Freie University of Berlin, looking to resolve a few footnotes for his dissertation, which had been accepted for publication. While visiting Harvard for the first time on a fellowship, he found answers.

“I went to Widener, and in one hour I found all the loose ends that I had desperately tried to find in Europe,” he recalled. “It was quite amazing, and I keep being amazed.”

Sollors plans to stay close. He has a study in Widener Library, where he will continue researching and writing, and work on a new edition of Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson. But beforehand, he’ll have to whittle down his collection of books that fill his office. “Now I’m going to get some more books,” he pointed to his doorway, where, stacked on a dolly were boxes wrapped in shiny gold and silver paper: a present from the department. It seems like the celebration never ends.

Werner SollorsMentor and scholarBy Alexandra Koktsidis

Photo by Christine Mansour20

“We are so spoiled with students, such wonderfully selected students...”

Professors Werner Sollors and Glenda Carpio share a laugh during the “Keywords in American Literary Studies” event.

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