It is my pleasure to introduce Heather Ferguson, associate professor of history at Claremont McKenna College, the new editor of RoMES. Dr. Ferguson will begin officially on 1 July 2017. In the meantime, Ashleigh Breske, the current managing editor, and I will be working with Heather to insure a smooth transition. For those readers who have not had the chance to meet Heather or become acquainted with her work, I will say more below about her impressive credentials. But first, I want to glance back briefly on my term as editor.

This article examines developments in the memoir form in Palestinian literature over time, concentrating on the period since the Oslo Accords of 1993. It begins by briefly looking at new, general theoretical perspectives on the memoir form relevant to recognizing the importance of memoirs by Palestinians. A shift from viewing memoirs as purely the product of individuals to validating the notion of collective recollection occurs in the theoretical literature and can be documented in the Palestinian memoir. Similarly, attention to the idea of recollection as fluid and as a process enriches our understanding of what Palestinian memorists are trying to achieve. This section draws upon the work of such foundational figures as Maurice Halbwachs, Paul Ricoeur, Sidonie Smith, and Julia Watson. It also incorporates the insights of those who have focused more specifically on the Palestinian memoir form, such as Rashid Khalidi and Susan Slyomovics. These theoretical views are then tested through the examination of fourteen works using the memoir format, ranging from the time of the dissolution of the Palestinian Mandate (Sakkakini, Jabra, Boullata) to the beginning of the new millennium and the decade beyond (Darwish, Barghouti, Amiry and Karmi). The article shows that any literary history of the memoir form in modern times would be incomplete without recognizing and incorporating the Palestinian contribution to this increasingly popular literary genre.

I want to kick off this discussion with three quotes and a statistic. The first quote is as follows: “The chief purpose [of historical education] is not to fill [someone's] head with a mass of material which he may perhaps put forward again when a college examiner demands its production.” The second—a line from a front page story in The New York Times—reads, “College freshmen throughout the nation reveal a striking ignorance of even the most elementary aspects of United States history.” And the third:

The production and dissemination of knowledge on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) has always had a particularly complex relationship vis-à-vis research funding, faculty hiring priorities, course scheduling schemas, and course enrollment numbers. In this essay, I hope to share some observations—that I have experienced firsthand and discussed with a number of colleagues—on teaching an introductory survey course on the history of the modern MENA region. Such reflections are rooted in my own experience of teaching at a public university with no current major research or teaching commitments to the MENA region. While these observations are not unique to the context within which I teach, they might be otherwise inflected in different contexts.

In this short piece, I will begin by raising two points about the future geography of the Middle East survey course and then lay out two salient points that were raised in the course of the panel discussion at MESA.

Every year, I teach a broad survey course on the Modern Middle East (between 120 and 200 students), along with seminars on a wide range of topics. Regardless of the content of these courses, I have three big goals. I want them to come away understanding that the history of the region is more complex and fascinating than they learned in high school and from the pundits, and the simplistic assumptions and solutions they offer answer no questions. Second, I want to persuade them that things change over time, and we can't understand anything without knowing its context—and the context of the Middle East is global. But most imperative: I want to convince students to be critical in analyzing sources of information. Informed citizenship requires students to be able to think critically, and that is what historians do offer. We analyze multiple sources in myriad ways.

Teaching modern Middle East history at the University of Melbourne raises problems of culture. Students are not generally acquainted with the Middle East and North Africa—even those whose families originate there—news coverage is patchy, and Australia is far away. Not all students are even arts students let alone history majors: our degree structure requires interdisciplinary study. The University is liberal about how to assess students, only requiring that during a twelve-week semester subject a student must write 4000 words. Within broad bounds, how teachers do this is up to them, although the Arts Faculty has a culture of avoiding unseen examinations. History major students are very accustomed to the “traditional” researched essay format, but it does not provide much variety of intellectual training; it is unfamiliar to non-Arts students; in classes that regularly number over 100 students, it is tiring and boring to assess; and large numbers of essays are freely available online. So I have introduced an assessment task to replace the standard researched essay. The purpose here is to describe an alternative approach to assessment and learning by using a simulation: in that sense the actual topic of the simulation is secondary. It concerns refugees, which is of course, a matter of vital current concern, but it is the reasoning behind the task that I hope is instructive.

The goals of the Middle East history survey course are to introduce students to the major events in the history of the Middle East and to show the diversity of Middle Eastern civilization. In this paper, I discuss how instructors can use the Internet to enrich their teaching of the Middle East history survey course for students known as “digital natives.”

Some years ago, a colleague from another institution told me how much she was looking forward to screening Nasser 56 in her introductory Middle East history course. Students had just finished reading about the Nasser era, and the screening of Muhamad Fadel's stylish biopic starring the charismatic film star Ahmed Zaki would serve as an enjoyable way to round out the unit. I was surprised, not at my colleague's use of the film in her class, but at her timing. Released in 1996, Nasser 56 is very much the product of the Mubarak era. It offers rich opportunities to discuss the particular challenges Egypt faced in the 1990s and how this nostalgic look back at a triumphant moment in Gamal Abdel Nasser's (Jamal ʿAbd al-Nasir's) presidency was marshalled to animate an economically and politically fraught period. Its celebration of ʿAbd al-Nasir as an effective and caring patriarch to the nation could be interpreted as an endorsement of Egypt's authoritarian political system. However, the film is less useful as an explication of ʿAbd al-Nasir as a political figure, or of 1950s Egypt.

Tariqah Naqshabandi Bayanullah (TNB) is a local branch of the global Naqshabandi order centered in Padamara, East Lombok, Indonesia. It has branches in cities on other Indonesian islands: Surabaya in East Java, and Makassar, Pare Pare, and Gowa in Sulawesi and on Sumbawa. This report is based on interviews with the Syekh (Syiril Fakraʾ, the current leader of the tariqah (Sufi Order), members of his family, and followers from Lombok, Sulawesi and Java; observation of his reception of a group of pilgrims; a religious talk (pengajian) in a village; and on an informal lesson delivered to several of his sons. It focuses on TNB's origins and history, the life story of Syekh Syiril Fakraʾ, TNB's religious orientation, views of other Islamic groups and non-Islamic religions, and its socio-political orientation.

The field of Middle Eastern Studies has seen a recent spate of publications that offer a timely and nuanced look at the intersection of language, ideology, and visual representation in Israel-Palestine. Scholars of cultural studies, comparative literature, history, film studies, and the visual arts will appreciate the breadth of perspective offered by a combined reading of Lital Levy's Poetic Trespass: Writing between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine, Gil Z. Hochberg's Visual Occupations: Violence and Visibility in a Conflict Zone, and Yaron Shemer's Identity, Place, and Subversion in Contemporary Mizrahi Cinema in Israel. This cluster of studies, taken as a whole, offers a coherent critical intervention into the politics of a literary and visual field marked by silences, lacunas, blind spots, and elisions. Poetic Trespass sketches the contours of a Hebrew literary landscape inhabited by a tacit Arabic presence. With a purview that extends to literature, cinema, and the plastic arts, Visual Occupations probes the tension between systemic practices of concealment and strategic modes of lending visibility. Identity, Place, and Subversion, a powerfully articulated analysis of Mizrahi cinema, interrogates the notion that ethnic difference has become irrelevant in the context of a contemporary Israeli melting pot.