“Not an Obvious Thing to Do: Being a Scholar of Islamic History”

Date: November 19th, 2014
Duration: 1h:9m:30s

The 2014 Fall Presidential Lecture Series
“Not an Obvious Thing to Do: Being a Scholar of Islamic History”
a lecture by
Dr. Chase F. Robinson
President and Distinguished Professor of History
The Graduate Center, The City University of New York

Lecture Summary
The contemporary Middle East is more or less constantly in the news, and nearly always for the wrong reasons—war, violence, and sectarian strife. Current events in Syria and Iraq are particularly distressing, but they constitute only the most recent installment in what, in many respects, is a region-wide conflict that has been smoldering or burning for decades.

It is little wonder, then, that the academic study of the Middle East focuses upon modern and contemporary issues. And most students who take an interest—who study Arabic or Hebrew or Persian, or who spend time there—do so because they want to help solve the political, economic, religious or social problems that beset the region.

I was once one of those students. But for reasons that I will explain—and which, I think, say something about the humanities in the late 20th and 21st centuries—I changed direction and devoted my academic career to Islamic history.

Why study the 7th, 8th or 9th centuries? Even stranger, why devote one’s academic career to it? It is not an obvious thing to do.

Chase F. Robinson is President of the Graduate Center of The City University of New York, the doctorate-granting institution of the nation’s largest university. Dr. Robinson, a historian of the premodern Middle East, is also Distinguished Professor of History.

From 2008 through June 2013, he served as Provost and Senior Vice President of the Graduate Center. In this capacity, Dr. Robinson led a comprehensive planning process culminating in the GC’s Strategic Plan for 2012-2016, outlining the institution’s major goals. Dr. Robinson also worked with the Office of Institutional Advancement to secure major funding to enhance faculty support, helped establish the Graduate Center at the forefront of the digital evolution within higher education, expanded the Master’s of Liberal Studies program, and launched major initiatives, such as the Initiative for the Theoretical Sciences, the CUNY Institute for Language Education in Transcultural Context, and the Advanced Research Collaborative.

Dr. Robinson received an A.B. (Honors) from Brown University, having also studied at the American University in Cairo, the University of Cairo, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1992, he earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, where he was awarded a Charlotte W. Newcombe Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. In 1993 he joined the Faculty of Oriental Studies and Wolfson College, Oxford, where he taught until 2008. From 1999 to 2000 he was a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and in 2005 he received a two-year British Academy Research Readership.

As Chairman of the Faculty Board of Oriental Studies at Oxford, Robinson put in place the department’s first academic plan, broadened its scope in terms of development and external relations, and forged new relationships with international donors as well as academic institutions in the Middle East.

A specialist in early Islamic history, Robinson is the author or editor of seven books and more than forty articles. He also serves on a number of editorial and review boards, and his commentaries have appeared in Inside Higher Education, the Huffington Post, the (London) Times Higher Education Supplement, and the New York Times.