An Interview With Professor Sahar Bazzaz, Chair of the Holy Cross
RL: When did you fall in love with history? When did you realize that you had a passion for history, to maybe take us back to the early days of Professor Bazzaz?
SB: Well, actually not so early because I was a little bit of a late bloomer frankly. I had studied sciences as an undergraduate and so deciding to pursue history in graduate school was a very radical switch for me. It was then in graduate school when I really began to love history in a way that was more than simply, “Oh, that was an interesting thing that happened” to an appreciation of its complexity. I loved the analysis part of studying history. And that love for analyzing history has actually had a lot to do with my professor in graduate school with whom I did a field with in Ottoman studies, in Ottoman history. His name is Jamaal Kafadar.
RL: Do you find that your background in sciences, which is a very rational mode of inquiry, which requires being very methodical and precise, has informed your ability to analyze history?
SB: I definitely think it has informed my analytical skills and my tendency to be as precise as possible with my scholarship. And that can sometimes be a hindrance, actually. So when I was writing my dissertation, one of my professors would always say to me, “You have to learn to “levitate” above your evidence. This isn’t science.” Which didn’t mean don’t be careful, but it meant that a cause and corollary isn’t always binary in history, you need to be careful of making absolute conclusions. So, interestingly I think my analytical skills were highly developed, but it was harder for me to do the interpretive piece. I had to really learn that. So, it was certainly a help, but I didn’t have a literary background. I didn’t have a strong humanities background, so I had to sort of learn what that encompassed as well. I went to a large state university for my undergraduate degree, so this idea of the liberal arts was very unfamiliar to me.
RL: And then you did your postgrad at Harvard, where you wrote your dissertation on the role of sufism in the North African nationalist movements?
SB: Yes, in the earliest phases.
RL: And how was your experience working on that, how long does a dissertation take, it takes the whole year?
SB: Oh, it takes several years. History, though this may change as the humanities are being undercut, historically, at least in the American academy, has been one of the longest PhD’s. For an average of about seven years. That has a lot to do with a variety of things. In my case, or if you study a region of the world that requires you to learn the languages of that region, and it may not just be one, and certainly in the case of the Middle East it’s many. So, there’s a lot of work that goes into learning the language. The research takes time, now it’s changed since the time I was in graduate school, now there’s increasingly more materials that are digitized. So, you can conduct research from your desk. In my case, it took a year to write my grant proposals, submit them, and wait through the grant cycle period to receive word. If you get the grant to support your research that can be a year to two and half year commitment. There’s all kinds of things that make this a long process. Particularly when you need funding to go farther afield and to learn languages. But that’s changing now because of more digitized material.
RL: And on the subject of digitization, I know in Historian’s Craft last semester you encouraged our class to spend more time combing through the library stacks with the understanding that the majority of our sources were found digitally, yet “getting lost” in the stacks could lead us to fortuitous discoveries. What are the pros and cons of the digitization of source material for students? Do students spend less time in the stacks?
SB: Yes, in my experience and of course I’m a different generation than you. It would be easy for me to fall into the, “Well, back in my day we didn’t do these kinds of things and now you young people…” [we both laugh]. I want to avoid that generational condescension. The world changes. But one thing I have noticed over the years is that, because you can get things online, I notice that there is more difficulty in thinking about and constructing an argument and a thesis because students want to grab and capture information from various sources and tabs. However, even when you look at an article online, if you look at a journal for example [She grabs a journal from her desk] like this, this is called Isis, it’s the journal for the American history of science society, a very important academic journal for historians of science. I like to read the physical copy and see what other articles have been put in the journal. I think that students on JSTOR miss understanding the larger journal the article was entered into. They don’t see how it relates. To me that’s a bit of a loss, the context in which it appears. I do think the idea, or my sense seems to be, that the idea that you need to read widely before you can begin to start thinking synthetically and develop a working question, that I find that students struggle more with. Because they think the question should have an answer that is easily accessible rather than an argument that is being built on the basis of broad reading. I don’t know exactly what the correlation is, but it’s certainly different from ten years ago.
RL: I remember you saying last semester to our class that there is a ratio between the amount you read and the number of sentences you can confidently write in a research paper.
SB: Exactly
RL: You have to be very careful.
SB: Yes, you have to be very careful. I don’t know if that way of thinking about history is going to change. The world changes. But I find that the deeper thinking and connectivity happens when students understand that they are reading arguments, not extracting information. That I think is a casualty of this digitization. One thing that I’ve noticed which is really interesting to me over the last five or six years is that my students always say, “Oh yes, I read this article and I got a lot of information” and I tell them all the time information is important but what you are reading when you are reading scholarship is an argument that is built on evidence. So you want to understand what is the arc of the argument. And I have found that to be very challenging to convince that rather than the extractive mining for detail, they are looking at a way of thinking and also trying to replicate that kind of thinking in conversation with others.
RL: It reminds me of a quote you referenced last semester, when speaking on this subject, that “writing history is like drinking in the ocean…”…
“…and piss a cup”
RL: “…and piss a cup” [We both laugh]
SB: It’s a famous quote from Gustave Flaubert, a 19th century French novelist.
RL: And I think the quote captures the essence of what we’re discussing.
SB: Right, that there is distillation that comes out of a lot of patience with reading. And I understand that with all of us we have really short attention spans. We sit with this thing [she holds her phone up] all the time. We have all become habituated to our phone’s distraction, and the kind of patience and slow engagement is harder to get at. If that’s the case and if that’s how it’s going to be then that ultimately means we have to think differently about what historians will ultimately do.
RL: Artificial Intelligence has emerged and has begun to change how history students interact with history. As chair, you have organized a summer workshop for the history department and will be discussing these developments. What will its focus be?
SB: Yes, it is going to be a two day workshop and the focus is multilayered. First, it’s an assessment of where the History Department is at after ten years of our novel and our very forward looking curriculum. It’s an evaluation of where we are ten years later. Part of evaluating means understanding what students expect of the curriculum and how that might differ from our expectations of students. A lot has changed since Covid. A lot. So part of this is to reconfigure and recalibrate after Covid. And then, of course we also need to think of Chat Gpt. That technology is here, and technology, like anything, has good and bad sides. So we have to understand it and we have to learn how to integrate it. There are many fascinating experiments done on this already. One experiment involved the students asking Chat Gpt to write an essay on a topic that they’re studying in class and then they’re assignment is to evaluate what chatgpt has done. What its arguments are and what sources it used. I think that’s a brilliant idea, that I will definitely incorporate.
RL: Did the adoption of this forward looking curriculum you mentioned, include adding the thematic specialization requirement and other faculty?
SB: Absolutely, when I started here our department was changing but still it was very traditional in some sense. And what I mean by that is that the majority of the faculty, about 80% of our history faculty, focused on the United States or on Europe. So there was a certain geographic specificity and a sprinkling of a few other specialities here and there. So, one thing was to try to expand the offerings of the curriculum. But another element of this reform was to try to, even within hiring Europeanist and Americanist, bring in scholars with new analytical methodologies. Just because they have that specific geographic focus doesn’t mean they can’t do innovative work. So also methodologically trying to get professors who are interested in, for example, gender history. Professors who are interested, like Professor Miller, in Native American history. That was so radical ten years ago. Or like Professor Spiro, who studies the history of capitalism in the United States in its connection to larger global phenomena. The History Department offers a curriculum now with not just geographic diversity but also methodological diversity. Those are the two main changes, and then we completely reconstructed the major, so that a student, instead of being able to graduate with 10 courses of US history at the two hundred level. Or in other words instead of basing the major around a continent or nation state we want students to think thematically about the phenomena that humans create and that impact human societies across time and space.
RL: That’s remarkable. Before coming to Holy Cross I had never heard of environmental history or studied Middle Eastern History, which I both ended up loving. I had only sort of known American and European history, and I am excited that the department is continuing to innovate its curriculum and add new historians, like the incoming professor who studies the history of technology, another history I had never heard of.
SB: Right, we’ve added several new faculty in the past few years. Professor Abrahamson who studies colonial colonial latin american history with a focus on indigeneity and empire. For a small school like us that is unheard of. We are a department that has a modern Latin Americanist and an early modern colonial Latin americanist. Which is quite unique. But things change and we’ll always need to reevaluate and so that’s the purpose of this two day workshop. To think of new pedagogies to enable students to think of the learning process of more participatory rather than hierarchical. Of course, the professors have authority but we want to try to find ways to involve and engage students who might not be drawn to history. Of course, the work never stops, but this is our intention.
RL: I’m excited to hear how the workshop goes. What are some things are you looking forward to doing this summer with some more freetime?
SB: Well, I am hoping to make some headway on an article I am working on. I am also going to be participating in a virtual plant humanities study group that is being run by Dug and Oaks. It is a research center in Washington, DC. I am hoping to find ways to ingregate plant humanities into some of my history of science work. I have that and do a little bit of traveling. There’s always stuff to do as chair, there’s administrative stuff to do over the summer. But there’s something about the temperature being substantially higher and having a little more flexibility with your time which is great. And reading novels. Historians should always be reading novels.
Thank you Professor Bazaaz for your time and guidance!
