Fresh Faculty: Youssef Ben Ismail

Q: What brought you to Amherst, and where are you coming from?

A: Before I came to Amherst, I was on a fellowship for three years at Columbia University. I taught classes there and I was a postdoctoral fellow in Columbia’s Society of Fellows. So I lived in New York for three years, and before that, I did my Ph.D at Harvard, though I mostly finished writing my dissertation in Tunis, where I’m from. I decided to come to Amherst for several reasons. One is the very unique and, for me, very fitting intellectual community of the LJST department … my work deals with law and history through an interdisciplinary lens, and this is one of the few departments in the country built around the study of law and the humanities. It just so happens that the department belongs to a college that’s incredible in so many ways. The students are very smart and engaged, which makes for a very rewarding experience in the classroom. My colleagues at the college are fantastic. And after three years in New York, I was happy to move to a place like the Pioneer Valley, which is culturally rich but at the same time quieter and a little more sane.

Q: What was your path to becoming a professor?

A: I pursued a master’s degree first, not knowing I would eventually do a Ph.D. I completed a two-year master’s program in Middle Eastern studies at Harvard, and I initially didn’t know where I would go with this. I did a couple of internships, in the public sector and in publishing, but quickly realized that working a traditional job in those fields wasn’t really for me and that I was hungry to learn more, so I applied to a Ph.D. program in Middle Eastern studies. By the end of that Ph.D., it became clear to me that if I wanted to continue learning, reading, and writing, being a university professor was the way to go.

Q: What inspired your interest in Middle Eastern studies?

A: In college, I was initially much more interested in China. I took intensive Mandarin classes throughout college and moved to Beijing as an exchange student during my senior year. But in 2011, the revolution broke out in Tunisia, and I suddenly found myself geographically and intellectually far from home. That was a defining period in my personal trajectory. I felt the need to participate in the events taking place in Tunisia and to understand them. That led me to reconsider my initial plans of becoming a sinologist and to turn to the study of the Middle East and North Africa instead. That was over a decade ago, and somehow that led me to a career of writing about sovereignty, autonomy, and belonging in the late Ottoman Empire.

Q: You mentioned to me that you come from a family of publishers. Did this background play a role in your career and academic interests?

A: It certainly did. It played a significant role in shaping my academic inclinations because I come from a family that has always valued thinking, reading, and writing as important endeavors. My father’s family has worked in the publishing world in Tunisia for a long time, both in weekly magazines and in book publishing. My father and his father believed that reading and writing had a crucial role to play in Tunisian society. I grew up with the idea that publishing was important work. On my mother’s side, my grandfather taught philosophy in high school right after Tunisia gained independence from France. So I also grew up very aware of the merits of teaching. I like to think that these influences came together and put me on a path to become an academic and a teacher in my own right.

Q: What courses are you teaching this semester?

A: I’m teaching two courses this semester. One is called “The Law of Colonialism.” It’s a course where we examine the many figurations of the law in colonial contexts. That means how law shaped colonialism, but also how it afforded opportunities for colonized people to fight against the colonial state. It’s a course that’s really exciting and relevant. We examine a variety of colonial contexts in which law shapes colonialism and vice versa. I’m also teaching a course called “Islam and the Modern State.” It’s a very different course because, unlike The Law of Colonialism, it’s focused on reading and analyzing primary sources. We almost exclusively read nineteenth and twentieth-century Muslim intellectuals, activists, legal thinkers, and political figures who think about the relationship between Islam and the modern state. We begin this investigation in the middle of the nineteenth century and we finish the semester in the contemporary period, so there’s a clear historical arc to the course. The course is tied together by a research paper that students develop throughout the semester based on their analysis of a corpus of sources. It’s more of a research-oriented class, which is rewarding for students interested in developing their own projects.

Q: What are you most excited about in your first year of teaching at Amherst?

A: I am really excited about the opportunity to build an intellectual community with my students in the classroom. I think of my classes as spaces where we read difficult texts carefully and think about them together. But I find that Amherst students have a real talent for thinking through hard questions in conversation with one another, which is an absolute joy to witness in the classroom. Fostering those conversations is what I am truly most excited about in my first year of teaching at the college.

Q: What courses do you hope to teach in the future?

A: I’m teaching a 300-level course in the spring called “Law’s Others.” It’s a seminar in which we think about the relationship between law and modern knowledge, using the work of Edward Said as a starting point. I will also co-teach a 200-level course called “International Law and Empire” with Professor Mark Firmani, who is also a professor in LJST. I’m very excited because it’s the first time that I will co-teach a class with a colleague. In this course, we will focus on the engagements of international law with empire and imperialism both historically and in the present.

Q: Are you working on any research now?

A: I am. I’m working on too many things. I’m currently finishing up a special issue for a journal with a colleague at the University of Southern California, and in this issue, I wear two hats because I’m the co-editor, but I’m also writing an article on the archive of sovereignty in Ottoman North Africa. I’ve been writing and editing it for a long time so I’m very excited to see it come out. I’m currently wrapping it up, so hopefully it will be published early in the spring semester. I am also working on my book — I’m working on several chapters at the same time and I hope to send the manuscript to my editors soon. I also promised a couple of colleagues book chapters in edited volumes that I’m slowly working on, but those will have to be on the back burner. Teaching is a lot of work so it’s also been exciting to find moments to work on my own research here and there.

Q: How are you settling into Amherst? As you said, it’s pretty different from New York.

A: It is different, but I really love it. It’s funny, I have a bit of a ready-made answer for you because I’ve had to speak about this a lot in the new faculty orientation events I’ve attended. But very honestly, there are many things in Amherst that have become anchors in this new life. We were talking about this earlier, but Amherst Cinema is really important to me. New York has a lot of independent cinemas, places like Film Forum and Metrograph, which I really treasured when I lived in the city. I was getting ready to let go of that when I moved here but then I discovered that Amherst has its own version, with truly fabulous programming. My wife and I try to go there often. We have seen five or six movies there so far this year including, most recently, Med Hondo’s “West Indies” and “Girls Will Be Girls,” a beautiful movie about a mother-daughter relationship by a young Indian filmmaker. That has really been one of the places that make Amherst home. I also run on the rail trail, which I realize everybody does, but it’s been great to step out of the house and be able to run surrounded by nature within a couple of minutes.

Another thing that has helped me think of Amherst as home in the last couple of months is this bookstore in Hadley called Grey Matter Books, which is such a gem. They have so many incredible books. Their foreign language section is surprisingly large and varied, and their Middle East studies collection is also excellent. They get batches of new books quite frequently, so I try to make a habit of going to check out what new things they have.

Q: As a young(er) faculty member, do you have any advice for students at Amherst?

A: I would say that it’s important to cast a wide net with your classes and to take classes that aren’t necessarily in one’s comfort zone or area of expertise. I really do think that’s crucial. I didn’t attend college in the U.S., so my college experience was skewed towards a number of disciplines starting freshman year. In my case, it was history and political science and I’m happy with that, but I think one of the tremendous benefits of a place like Amherst is that you can surprise yourself with your classes and with your choices, and let your personal interests guide you. That’s really a magical thing. Taking classes outside of your traditional area of interest is really important because it helps you cultivate your curiosity. I would also say try to get to know your professors. One of the best parts about studying at Amherst is the ability to get to know your professors and have a real intellectual rapport with them.