Dr. Elizabeth Campbell Joins the History & Political Science Department

Dr. Elizabeth Campbell

By Elizabeth Campbell

I am happy to be a new member of the Department of History and Political Science.

I am originally from San Diego, California, and went to UC Berkeley as an undergraduate. I completed my PhD at the University of Washington in Seattle and was a post-doctoral associate at the University of Pittsburgh in the World History Center. During my PhD research I lived in Tunis, Damascus and Beirut.

I moved to Buffalo from the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, where I taught at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani for the past four years. The school was founded about ten years ago in order to bring American-style education to the region and instruction is in English. Students come from the Kurdish and Arab areas of Iraq. I taught world history, the history of the Middle East and history research methods. I hope to find ways to connect students at Daemen and AUIS, through joint online classes or research projects.

I am working on a Digital History project with students in Iraq and the library at UCLA that I will continue at Daemen. War and instability in the area have forced many people to leave their homes and the records of the ancient and recent history are in danger of being lost. In this project we collect documents and materials that people have in their homes, such as letters, diaries, pictures, maps, and records, and digitize them to preserve them and make them available to people in the region and to scholars.

My research focuses on the transition from the late antique to the early Islamic period in the Middle East. I am studying Christian monasteries and their role in the countryside of Iraq and Syria in this period using Arabic books about monasteries that describe their popularity as places to visit, enjoy their gardens, drink wine and sing poetry.

This semester I am teaching HST 105: Ancient World History and HST 225: The Indian Ocean in World History, which covers the connections and interactions between different peoples across the Indian Ocean world.

In the future I plan to teach classes on Digital History and Humanities that introduce ways of using digital resources for the study of history, mapping and visualizing information and creating local history projects, classes on the history of the Middle East, the Silk Road, the Mediterranean World, ancient Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome. I worked for two years helping refugees from Iraq settle in California, and I hope to offer a service learning course working with refugees in Buffalo.

I look forward to meeting everyone this semester.