Professor Ammiel
Alcalay
King Hall 210A
Tel: (718) 997-5586
E-mail: ammiel.alcalay@qc.cuny.edu
Professor of Hebrew. Ph.D., City University
of New York; Department Chair, 1995-1999
A recipient of the College Teaching Award, Prof. Alcalay has taught
Sephardic Literature (both Hebrew and in-translation), and a variety
of courses on Middle Eastern and Mediterranean literacy and intellectual
culture and its contemporary and modern reception, at both the undergraduate
and graduate levels, as well as creative writing. A comparatist
by training, he specializes in these topics and in Balkan literatures
and history, poetics, and theories of translation; he publishes
translations of Hebrew and Bosnian, as well as his own poetry.
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I am variously considered
a scholar, critic, translator and poet/prose writer. Though the range
of my concerns is broad, I have followed a certain path in which all
aspects of my work - scholarly research, writing prose or poetry,
translation, compiling, editing and reviewing texts - feed and nurture
each other. My immersion in a diversity of languages and cultures
has shaped and informed my place win American culture. I have come
to see myself as a conveyor of ideas, texts, histories, cultural encounters
and narrative points of view that, for a variety of reasons, have
not gotten the attention they merit.
Over the past fifteen years, I have focused primarily on Hebrew and
Jewish literature of the Middle East, in its Islamic, Levantine Arabic,
and Israeli contexts. My work on Bosnia during the war in former Yugoslavia
has entailed similar efforts at creating the cultural space for unfamiliar
works to emerge. Throughout, my work as poet and prose-writer remains
a crucial reference point, representing a kind of standard in form
and content that I insist my other writing (and translation) adheres
to. This work, as well, covers a great geographical and chronological
range, and the form it takes often cuts across narrowly defined areas
dividing "creative," "critical" and "scholarly"
domains.
These are concerns that I have taken to heart in both my teaching
as well as my involvement in the life of the college. For the past
several semesters, I have been teaching the Advanced Poetry Workshop
in the English department. Rather than a departure for me, I have
found this experience has enabled me to rejoin diverse cultural and
linguistic strands within the texture of my native American idiom.
Moreover, through the incorporation of translation exercises, research
projects involving other cultural and linguistic traditions, as well
as wide-ranging reading assignments, these classes have given me an
opportunity to put into practice very practical curricular and cultural
concerns.
These concerns revolve around what I perceive to be a lack of cohesion
in the general education requirements at the college and an overwhelming
acceptance of monolingualism and monoculturalism.
My initiation of and continuing involvement in the Human Rights
at Queens Memorial Lectures Project, and International Visiting
Writers@Queens are ongoing efforts to cross boundaries and bring
the truly pluricultural realities of our students and the world
we inhabit to legitimate, creative and intellectually stimulating
forms of expression. On the administrative level, I have spared
no effort to spur on a pragmatic discussion among colleagues across
the campus to break down the often artificial barriers existing
between disciplines and diverse forms of knowledge. I see this kind
of work as simply an extension of my own creative and intellectual
vocation, one that must be carried out beyond the life of the mind
engaged in scholarship or creative work and into the public domain
where it can effect the kinds of expectations we place upon our
students and the very structure of our institutions. |

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