Being the 'Other':Ê Teaching U.S.
History as a Fulbright Professor in Egypt

Maureen A. Flanagan
Michigan State University

If for Russell Johnson the experience of teaching the Gilded Age and Progressive Era in Turkey was that of being in a "not so strange land," my four months as a Fulbright professor at the University of Alexandria in Egypt were often quite the opposite. There I was truly a stranger in a strange land. But it is important to note right from the start that by strange I mean foreign in the sense that American history of any sort is not part of the Egyptian university curriculum. So much so that before I arrived in Egypt I had been given only a hazy idea of what I might be teaching. Once there I quickly found that I had to jettison the proposal that I had submitted for the Fulbright competition  ø to teach about the processes and ideas of democracy in U.S. history, most especially in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. The reasons for my inability to teach what I had proposed help explain much about the place of U.S. history, indeed all of "western" history, in Egyptian universities, and how the situation differs enormously from those described for Canada, Mexico, and Turkey. In these "post-eleventh September" days, it seems to me especially important to understand that while in the U.S. we seek to expand our university history curricula into a world vision, in Egypt exactly the opposite has been happening. Why this should be so in the age of globalization, and what lessons it has for U.S. historians, I think are among the valuable insights that can be gained from a Fulbright teaching fellowship in the Arab world.	1
The University of Alexandria is the second oldest public university in Egypt. The faculty of arts, to which I was attached, has approximately 15,000 students in history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, political science and foreign languages. With the exception of those enrolled in the English curriculum, the majority of the students speak little or no English. Language was thus the first hurdle that I encountered upon my arrival. The request for an American Fulbright professor to teach at the university had originated with one of the senior professors in the history department whose career in U.S. history had included time spent in the U.S. He was concerned with the diminished position of U.S. history in the department curriculum. There was a single required one-term course, taught now by a professor not trained in the U.S. whose command of English was very shaky. But since the majority of history students speak little English, and I do not speak Arabic, once I arrived in Alexandria, but not before, it registered on all involved that I could not teach in the history department because of the language barrier.	2
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