After his first year at Duke University, Andrew Simon spent a summer working with a children’s rights NGO in Yemen through DukeEngage, which was then a brand new program. After graduating from Duke with a degree in Arabic, Middle East, and Islamic Studies in 2010, he earned a Ph.D. from Cornell University, where he broke ground on what would become his first book, “Media of the Masses: Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt.”
Today, Simon is a Senior Lecturer in Middle Eastern Studies at Dartmouth College, where he teaches courses on Middle Eastern culture through the lenses of film, sound, and technology.
Why did you choose to do DukeEngage?
I started studying Arabic my senior year of high school in Connecticut, five years post 9/11. At the time, the Middle East, for me, existed only in relation to those attacks, and I was curious to learn more about the region’s history and culture.
I continued with Arabic when I arrived at Duke. I thought I was going to be pre-med, so I did the Global Health FOCUS program along with Professor Mbaye Lo’s Arabic class. It was through Arabic that I started taking other courses on Middle East culture, literature, politics, and history.
When Professor Lo came to me towards the end of my freshman year, I had only been outside of the U.S. one time in my life, traveling with FOCUS to Costa Rica. He told me about the DukeEngage pilot program to Yemen and asked if I wanted to go.
I knew nothing about DukeEngage, because it was brand new at the time. At that point in my life, I couldn’t even identify Yemen on a map. But I had this desire to travel, see other places, and come into contact with Arabic outside of a classroom. And so, I immediately said yes.
What was the most meaningful part of your DukeEngage experience?
Prior to DukeEngage, I had only encountered the Middle East on the news and in films. It made all the difference going to Yemen and speaking with Yemeni people. Seeing people who were so committed to creating meaningful change through promoting things like children’s rights, despite the many obstacles stacked against them, really inspired me.
I was very elementary in Arabic at that time, but being able to have conversations with people, to learn about their lives, to show that curiosity, and then to encounter such generosity in exchange is a side of Yemen that I think about even now. So many discussions of Yemen nowadays focus entirely on the Houthis, Red Sea bombings, U.S. foreign policy, and war, but there’s a completely different side of the country that all of those conversations are missing.
“DukeEngage is going to be impactful in ways that you might not even anticipate, and it could also serve as the starting point for something you’ve yet to imagine.”
— Andrew Simon
When I was in Yemen with DukeEngage, this NGO called The Democracy School asked me if I wanted to organize any sort of initiative in collaboration with them. I saw a lot of Yemeni kids playing soccer where I was living and I thought we could organize some sort of soccer tournament, and in between games we could host children’s rights workshops.
We brought together nearly a hundred kids for a one-day event, which received some coverage from Yemeni media. I was able to secure funding from Duke through the Office of the Provost, and the next year I wanted to host the tournament again. When I traveled back, we expanded beyond soccer to volleyball. Both Yemeni boys and girls participated the second time around.
What are you doing now?
I’ve been at Dartmouth for eight years now. I teach classes on the Middle East and film, popular culture in the Middle East, and modern Middle East history.
Drawing on my time in Cairo during the Arab Spring, I wrote a book on how cassettes were the Internet before the Internet in Egypt. Courtesy of cassettes, an unprecedented number of people, for the very first time, could create culture and circulate information. A lot of us attribute these developments to social media sites like Facebook, but cassettes empowered countless people to become cultural producers and distributors, as opposed to only consumers, decades before. Earlier this year, “Media of the Masses” debuted in Arabic at the Cairo International Book Fair with Dar El Shorouk, a leading press in the Middle East, and it’s now a bestseller in Egypt.
Currently, I am in the process of making my private collection of cassettes from Egypt public in a digital archive for anyone to access, explore, and enjoy. It is my hope that this undertaking will demonstrate the vibrancy of Middle Eastern culture and complicate reductive portrayals of the region that we often encounter in the U.S.
How did DukeEngage influence your academic or career path?
Engaging with people in the Middle East, having those conversations, and hearing about things that they cared about rather than things that we are told to care about was very influential for me.
When people talk about the Middle East, or when you see it on the news, it’s so often framed in terms of oil, Islam, or terrorism, and American popular culture plays a big part in perpetuating that framing. In my teaching and scholarship, I try to lead discussions on topics that, if you went to the Middle East, you could have conversations about them with people there, along the lines of the conversations I had in Yemen during DukeEngage.
Last year, I had the chance to work with a student from Gaza. At the end of one of my classes, I always ask students what they will take away from the course. One of the things this student said was that the materials I selected for us to discuss demonstrated that I’ve lived in the Middle East.
He had already come into contact with some of these sources, like songs or films, but he had never seen professors in this country teach with them. This remark reaffirmed my belief in drawing upon my experience in the Middle East in the classroom.
Is there anything else you want to say about DukeEngage?
DukeEngage can impact you professionally. It’s an asset to say you’ve been to different places and completed the program. But then it’s also something that can radically expand your worldview. You realize that your world is no longer only Duke, Durham, North Carolina, or even the U.S., and I think that is a key lesson. It’s not just a professional opportunity; it’s a chance for personal growth.
I would encourage everyone to take advantage of DukeEngage, to travel, and to spend time in a place beyond just a few days. You could form lasting relationships during that engagement.
DukeEngage is going to be impactful in ways that you might not even anticipate, and it could also serve as the starting point for something you’ve yet to imagine.