Presidential Biography
As a historian, I am a product of, and write within my own narrow, intellectual milieu, even as I feel the need to be connected to the larger ebb and flow of events in and outside the academy. When and how I acquired the sense of urgency about telling the story remains a mystery to me. Certainly, service is in my blood, as exemplified by the opening sentence of my father’s speech at my parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary: “Margaret and I are committed to service to our community,” a line now part of the family lore concerning my father’s simultaneous dedication and singular sense of a lack of occasion. I suppose it helps to have roots in New England and New Amsterdam, as well as a few English immigrant ancestors. The Harris family (now just me, my three brothers and their children) was saddled with some innate sense of duty to humankind.
I was born in Plymouth, Indiana, a piece of serendipity related to my father’s employment as an English teacher at nearby Culver Military Academy, then essentially a reform school run like a boot camp, but my parents relocated to the East Coast before I was ten. I was a particularly oblivious and naïve teenager who did not worry too much about world politics, at least until the death of President John F. Kennedy and the arrival of the Beatles. I first understood my own cultural narrowness when I spent a year in Istanbul in 1961-62 at the age of fifteen. My father taught English literature at a state high school, and I found myself one of a handful of non-Turks at the American Academy for Girls in Üsküdar. I experienced minority and foreign status for the first time. In retrospect, I reveled in being an outsider in the school, the city and country. Not quite an epiphany, the experience was nonetheless profound enough to mark my educational and career choices forever. Istanbul in the early sixties had a population around 2,000,000. Moda, where I lived, retained its cosmopolitan society of Greeks, Armenians, Jews and Turks, now all but vanished. The Fenerbahçe tramway, open-sided in the summer, was still in operation, and Istanbul was a paradise of disorder, exotic smells and friendly and inquisitive neighbors.
The questions I was asked by my Istanbul companions revolved not around popular music, or TV, not yet widely available in Turkey, but rather about black and white. Of course, it was the civil rights era in the States, and young Turks wanted to know why the United States was so racist, and why it had taken so long for the Afro-American population to gain essential rights and freedoms. This, I understood in retrospect, from young citizens of a country that had violently carved itself out of a dying empire, declared itself Turk, just experienced the first of three military coup d’etats, and had not yet fully confronted the conundrums of identity and historical memory of later decades.
Suffice it to say that the experience left me an outsider in my own country, which I remain to this day. Not an ex-patriot; rather I am a permanent intellectual exile from the idea of the American empire, with all its lethal consequences. The time in Turkey also left me with a wealth of curiosity about other cultures, especially one so different from my own. Hence, attempts at cross-cultural mediation and explanation invest my teaching and research.
I acquired the spoken idiom of Turkish as that girl visiting Istanbul, but had the great privilege of learning Turkish grammar and literary history from a master, Talat Halman, in a year as a “Critter,” one of only fifteen female undergraduates enrolled in the Princeton Critical Languages Program in 1966-67. I finished a BA in French at Allegheny College in Meadville, PA., another one of those odd obstinate choices the young make. In my case, I simply refused to entertain going to Middlebury College, the alma mater of my parents and two brothers. My career choice was to be a librarian, like my mother, but to do it overseas, at the United States Information Service libraries in major cities of the world. After graduation in 1968, and a Masters in Library Science at U. C. Berkeley in 1973, I spent many years as a professional librarian, at the edge of the scholarly cauldron, at Stanford, Princeton, Northwestern and Toronto, without going overseas, and before being brave enough to jump from the frying pan into the academic fire. At Princeton, where I worked from 1968-69, and again from 1973-80, I had the great privilege of working for Hungarian linguist and late Near East Curator Rudolf Mach, infamous for smoking Gaulois in a meerschaum holder in the basement of Firestone library, in a room piled high with the thousands of books he bought on his numerous trips to the Middle East. I also began the study of Arabic at the University of Pennsylvania which I continued later at the University of Toronto. Those years gave me an intimate appreciation of the epistemologies of knowledge acquisition and dissemination as exemplified by some of our finest Middle East library collections.
One of the greatest cross-cultural risks of my life was to wed a Muslim Turk, in 1982. I first met Oktay Aksan on the road in Turkey, in 1962, and we have since made many trips together, the most recent in 2008 which was a journey of 12,000 kms from Hamburg to Istanbul via Romania and Bulgaria and back through Greece, Italy, Germany and France. He made my transition from librarian to historian possible, when we moved to Toronto after our marriage. He too is an intellectual exile: an Istanbul-born son of Bosnian survivors of the Balkan Wars & World War I, and an escapee from the imagined Turkish nation, so we deal happily, often noisily, with one another. A friend of ours has dubbed Oktay “the presidential consort.” I prefer “the last Ottoman.”
The University of Toronto, generous to a neophyte orientalist, and in its benign neglect of a mature student, allowed me the great privilege of pursuing a PhD about Ottoman reformer and diplomat Ahmed Resmi Efendi (1700-83) into the recesses of Turkish libraries and archives. Shortly after completion of the degree (1991), I was appointed to the History Department at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, once again an outsider, as I proved to be the only one on campus who taught Islamic, Middle Eastern and Ottoman subjects for my first ten years. Both university and adopted country have allowed for my maturation as a Middle East historian and generously supported my research for which I am most grateful. Canadians have a strange relationship with their neighbors in the United States, seemingly all but invisible to Americans, yet irritating in our social welfare state smugness. I am now a member of the hyphenated society, as immigrants here like to call themselves, a Canadian-American with dual citizenship, so smugness has been added to alienation as part of my profile.
In the late 1990s, I was drawn into a multi-year research program at McMaster called “Globalization & Autonomy,” which brought together more than forty scholars from across various disciplines together on at least three occasions. Our first task turned out to be how to talk to one another, as we attempted a definition of globalization. Learning the language of other fields has helped me as I moved from intellectual history to the study of Ottoman warfare and reform, which arena I entered with the same naivety that has characterized most of my choices in life, blithely unconcerned about the steep learning curve it would require. I was in the throes of completing Ottoman Wars 1700-1870 when to my horror the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, making me re-examine my complicity as a historian in perpetuation of cycles of violence.
In much of my work, I have therefore focused on finding a new vocabulary or new narrative for the history of the pre-modern Middle East, to substitute for those we have (or should have) discarded in the post-Orientalism age: modernization, or westernization, or secularization, or eastern questions, or Muslim obscurantism, or terrible Turks, or more recently, the clash of civilizations, Arab terrorism and/or Islamofascism. Said’s workhas clearly left a mark on me just as much as it has everyone else in this field, and the depressing frequency with which such images and descriptions resurface with each new generation gives me pause and has made me exceedingly angry; even occasionally struck dumb for lack of a meaningful vocabulary of rebuttal.
Teaching remains one of the restorative connectives of my scholarly life, because I learn more from my students than any half-dozen books on the Ottomans. They ask the disconcerting questions, and force me to reevaluate my position. I use the classroom and the occasional public lecture as the places to draw together the threads of my own journey in order to convey the uniqueness and potentiality of the Ottoman past. Outsiders were embraced by the emerging empire if they brought some talent to the enterprise. Initially, there were no boundaries of race and class. Coercion was of course one way to become Ottoman, but self-identification with the empire could also bring large benefits. I am not sentimental; rather I try to find meaningful ways to widen the access to a highly under-represented and mangled story of a society that continues to stand on the margins and yet is absolutely integral to the “idea” of Europe.
Teaching is now much facilitated and complicated by the internet. We are in the midst of an enormous revolution in our understanding of the delivery and reception of knowledge, and we will soon be lost in translation if we do not stay tuned. We are not very far away from accrediting PhDs produced in the virtual environment of Second Life, and Middle East resources and scholars have yet to migrate in significant ways to the new electronic research worlds. We all benefit from the new environment, as much of my inspiration and stimulation result from my connections across the electronic world, but my fear is that our students will lose the apprenticeship and serendipitous discovery of new ideas in libraries and archives in strange places. If the study of globalization has taught me anything, it is that the more access we have to information, the more parochial we become.
I have been speaking of being an imaginary exile, but those who know me well also know that one of my great laments concerns the loss of community in the modern world. So I feel privileged to have belonged to the global community of Middle East scholars for more than a quarter century, and to have served as an officer in three organizations connected to the study of the region: the Middle East Librarians Association, the Turkish Studies Association, and now, the Middle East Studies Association. |
