Abstract
The essay argues that the widely acknowledged “crisis” in the humanities extends beyond the United States to many understudied, and arguably misunderstood, regions. It relates case-studies of the American University in Beirut and Northwestern University’s Qatar campus, buttressed with curricular analyses, enrollment figures, faculty hiring, and extant data on the region’s humanities programs, to provide a glimpse of US influence and local conditions in the Middle East. Mediated by the ever-present specter of colonial history, recent Western military and economic interventions, and the implications of English’s role in globalization, the present crisis in the West has been a reality in the Middle East for decades, yet is also deflected by newer and wealthier humanities programs in English (and other languages) tailored to meet the local education market.
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Hodapp, J. (2021). The Crisis in the Humanities: A Perspective from the Middle East. In: Chilton, M., Clark, S., Yoshihara, Y. (eds) Asian English. Asia-Pacific and Literature in English. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-3513-7_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-3513-7_9
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