Original air date: 15 March 2016 | During the late Ottoman period, the Syrian Protestant College in Beirut became a leading center of higher education in the Eastern Mediterranean and for the Arab world in particular. With the establishment of British and French Mandates in the Middle East following the First World War, the Syrian Protestant College--now known as the American University of Beirut--became an educational hub not only for the Arab elite and middle class but also for local teachers and bureaucrats that would serve in the colonial mandate governments. In this episode, Hilary Falb Kalisman shares her research on the history of scholarship students from the British Mandates and their life at AUB during the interwar period, highlighting dimensions of class, nation, and transnationalism that emerged out of the educational experience and tracing the impacts of their education as they returned to serve in mandate and post-mandate independent governments of Iraq, Palestine, and Transjordan.

http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2016/03/AUB-british-mandate.html

Hilary Falb Kalisman is currently a visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. She completed her PhD at the University of California-Berkeley in May 2015. Her research focuses on education in the Middle East during the Mandate period.

Huma Gupta is a Ph.D. student at the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture (AKPIA) at MIT. Her dissertation research focuses on the structural relationships between urban planning, architecture, state formation and migration in modern Iraq. She is also interested in the sonic and visual past and continues to think of ways to integrate sensory histories into her research.

Chris Gratien holds a Ph.D. from Georgetown University's Department of History. His research focuses on the social and environmental history of the Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East. He is currently preparing a monograph about the environmental history of the Cilicia region from the 1850s until the 1950s.

Nir Shafir is a historian of the Middle East whose research examines the intersections of knowledge production, religious practice, and material culture in the early modern world (1400-1800). He curates Ottoman History Podcast’s series on history of science in addition to being one of the co-founders of hazine.info, a website that explores the archives and libraries of the Islamic world. He is currently an advanced doctoral candidate in the History Department at UCLA.

CREDITS

Episode No. 231
Release Date: 15 March 2016
Recording Location: Cambridge, MA
Editing and production by Chris Gratien
Special thanks to Kara Güneş for allowing us to use the composition "Istanbul" in the intro and outro music
Sound excerpts for archive.org: Baglamamin Dugumu - Necmiye Ararat and Muzaffer; Harmandali - Recep Efendi, Cemal Efendi
Images via Library of Congress and Before Their Diaspora
Bibliography courtesy of Hilary Falb Kalisman