TEACHING

Besides my Arabic language courses, I teach courses on Arabic literature in translation. One is a course on The Arabian Nights, and spring semester 2005 I will teach a new course on contemporary Arabic fiction in translation. Some of the authors studied will includes Naguib Mahfouz, Yusuf Idris, Ghassan Kanafani, Gamal al-Ghitani, Abdurrahman Munif.

In addition I also teach a course on the history of the blues: REL 151: The Blues. And, in one way or another, the creation of this course has led to most of the new developments in my work in video and in writing that are described in this web site. I first broached the idea of the course after a trip through the South in 1999, and I was gratified by the response at the UR. Deans Green and LeBlanc supported me, as did my department Religion & Classics. Various faculty involved in music were supportive and helpful in many ways; among them Vice_President Paul Burgett and the faculty at Eastman School of Music. At Eastman I must single out Dave Headlam in particular who helped me with the syllabus the first year.

When I concieved the course I also began to think about how I might make use of new techonology. For example, I realized that if students could only listen to the music by borrowing a CD or record album that was on reserve, then the class would have to be quite small. So with the help of Eric Likness and other people in the Educational Technology Center I digitized much of my own record collection. This was put on the courses server at the UR in the form of streaming audio, and it was augmented by numerous CDs. Students in the course receive a user name and password and can listen to the music anywhere they have an adequate connection. As the course developed many images were added to the music pages, photos of musicians and locales and the like. Finally a large number of articles, some from fairly obscure blues journals were added to the site, mostly in the form of PDFs.