Instructors and Staff

“The instructors were knowledgeable and truly cared about their subjects.”

Rebecca Eder, 2012

Students in Understanding the Arab World are supervised and accompanied by instructors from the program, including Site Director Anna Swank and a staff of resident advisers. Resident advisers have completed an intensive two-week training program and have worked as RAs in the New York Summer Program for High School Students.

Courses are taught by scholars devoted to the highest standards of research and teaching.

Instructors

Anna Swank, Site Director
Anna Swank holds a master's degree from the Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at New York University, where she was awarded a MacCracken Fellowship and wrote on Lebanese diasporas during World War One. She studied Arabic at the Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA) at the American University in Cairo, for which she received both Foreign Language and Area Studies and CASA fellowships. Swank worked for the Columbia Arabic Summer Program before becoming the inaugural instructor and curriculum designer for the high school Arabic program at Friends Seminary in New York City, which was featured in the New York Times. Swank has also translated Arabic literature and organized events for Book Expo America and ArteEast, an arts non-profit in New York devoted to Middle Eastern art and artists. Swank has lived and traveled extensively in the Middle East for the past nine years, a time in which her passion for Arabic gradually overtook her previous devotion to music arrangement.

Beau Bothwell
Beau Bothwell holds a Ph.D. in musicology from Columbia University; he defended his dissertation, "Song, State and Sawa," on United States radio broadcasts in Syria in October 2012. His research addresses the intersection between music, mass media, and transnational politics in the Middle East and the U.S. Bothwell has lived and studied Arabic in Yemen while on a fellowship from the American Institute for Yemeni Studies and in Syria on a FLAS grant. He received his M.A. and M.Phil. from Columbia University, where he teaches courses in the Music Department and has lectured on various aspects of music, culture, and media in the Arab world. Bothwell also holds degrees in music and ethnomusicology from UCLA, where he began his interest in Arabic music and culture through playing the oud in UCLA’s Near Eastern Ensemble under Ali Jihad Racy. Bothwell has articles forthcoming in the American Music Review and the New Grove Dictionary of Music.

Bram Hubbell
Bram Hubbell holds an M.A. in history from UCLA. He teaches Modern World History and Modern Middle Eastern History at Friends Seminary, a private high school in New York City. Over the past ten years, he has traveled extensively throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Hubbell has worked with teachers around New York on teaching Islam and the Middle East, and has published articles about the teaching of world history. As an independent consultant to the College Board, he is a member of a committee that is developing teacher education materials and workshops for the new Advanced Placement World History curriculum.