Travel in the Balkans: Peja, Skopje, & Sofia

June 13-June 20, 2012

Over the last two weeks, fellow Fulbrighter Dave McTier and I have enjoyed traveling in the Balkans, a region as rich in scenery as in history.

On June 13, we made a day trip to Peja (Peć), about 90 minutes west of Pristina, just east of Montenegro.  As you’ll see in the photos, this area features the Rugova valley and some of the most spectacular mountains in Kosova.

**Click on the first picture below to scroll through the gallery images in a larger, “slideshow” format.**

Then on June 19, we took a bus to Skopje, Macedonia, where we followed winding stone streets to specialty shops, produce markets, and film festivals; we also sampled several of the hundreds of out-door coffee shops.  Macedonia’s capital also boasts a town center with huge new government buildings and countless statues celebrating the conquests of Philip and his son, Alexander the Great.

**Click on the first picture below to scroll through the gallery images in a larger, “slideshow” format.**

Dave McTier with fellow bus passengers

The next day, we boarded another bus for Sofia, Bulgaria’s capital.  En route, we marveled at Macedonia’s countryside, stunningly mountainous and green.  Once over the Bulgarian border, we saw more mountains but also frequent grim reminders of the Soviet era, small towns filled with dilapidated, boxy grey buildings, abandoned factories, squalid apartment buildings, and shacks.

The outskirts of Sophia reveal the same signs of poverty and displacement, but, as you will see in the photos, the inner city features grand government buildings, archeological museums, and innumerable mosques and Orthodox churches.  As do other houses of worship in Europe, these offer rich iconography celebrating the faith-narratives of the past, but these shrines attract active believers, not just tourists.

**Click on the first picture below to scroll through the gallery images in a larger, “slideshow” format.**

Orthodox church

Grand Hotel

Russian Orthodox Church

Russian Orthodox Church

Rich, the expat

Orthodox church

Street musicians

Smurfs?

National Theatre

Bulgaria-Macedonia border

For more historical details, please visit Dave McTier’s blog posts for Peja & Rugova as well as Sofia.

Njerëz Me Shpresa Të Thyera

June 3, 2012

Njerëz Me Shpresa Të Thyera, or “Men with Broken Hopes,” is a play that tells the story of soldiers returning from Vietnam in 1970. My Fulbright colleague Dave McTier directed his senior male students in this, their “diploma production.” I loved their performances of these troubled young men.

Please visit Dave’s blog to read the full details and see pictures of how he and his students brought this play to life.

Below are a few snapshots from the performance I attended. One of the pictures features director Dave McTier with the author, Shaip Grabovci, and his wife.

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Photo Tour 7: Prishtinë & Mitrovicë

May 9, 2012

Today, Dave McTier and I made a day-trip to Mitrovicë, a town on the northern border, split between Serbia and Kosova by the Ibar River.

See Dave’s post about our adventure, too.

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Dragodan with David McTier

April 22, 2012

Today, Dave and I took advantage of the nice weather and visited a few more sites in Prishtinë.  He describes our adventure well: http://davidmctierinkosovo.com/2012/04/22/dragodan-qendra/. The pictures below are ones he took of yours truly during our outing.

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The NEWBORN sculpture and the cafe where we had dessert are near the futbol stadium.

Photo Tour 6: More Sites, Prishtinë and UP Campus

March 31-April 1, 2012

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From Mulliqi and Miller to the American Corner

January 31-February 1, 2012

National Theatre of Kosova

On Monday night Dave McTier and I visited the National Theatre, braving temperatures near zero F to do so. Though we had hoped to see Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, we learned on arrival that we had been misinformed about the schedule. Instead, we saw a piece by a local intellectual, Haqif Mulliqi. Never having received a program, I can’t report the title of the play, but I can say that the audience loved it, laughing heartily throughout. I loved it, too, even though my nascent Albanian skills proved no match for the rapid dialogue and rather loud musical motifs. The four characters, three middle-aged men and a young woman, seemed adrift, homeless, lugging huge valises constantly about the street. Yet they all showed a zest for life—for vigorous debate, for sexual passion, for patriotism, for friendship, and most of all for laughter. The actors, just like the characters they played, had great fun, embracing one another and thumbing their noses at hard times.

Having thawed out by Tuesday morning—temperatures had fallen below zero by the end of the play and dropped to -8 over night—I spent the day mainly inside, revisiting Willy Loman, a character who could have used the good company I saw on stage last night. As I thought about ways of using Marxist critical theory to help my students understand Willy, I realized that I have always seen the failed Salesman as more than a proletariat victim of capitalist hegemony, that I continue to buy Arthur Miller’s claim that a low-man can attain tragic dignity, so long as we can see, however “wrong” his American dream, that he suffers for the woman and the sons he has hurt but intended—in living and in dying—to love.

Fakulteti i Filologjisë (College of Philology)

Today, February 1, I met Professor Lindita Rugova at the Fakulteti i Filologjisë (Faculty [College] of Philology) at the University of Pristina. Lindita serves as vice dean and teaches in the Departamenti i Gjuhë dhe Letërsi Angleze (Department of English Language and Literature), where I will teach.

My Classroom, in Fakulteti i Filologjisë

Kindly spending two hours with me, Lindita showed me my office and the classroom where I will teach; she also introduced me to Dean Osman Gashi, to the Head of English Language and Literature, Professor Shykrane Germizaj, and to several other colleagues whose names I have yet to master. Though I slipped and slid on ice en route to the university, I could not have asked for a warmer reception.

Then from 2:30-5:00, Dave McTier and I took a cab to the US Embassy, where we received security and medical briefings and learned about the vast array of cultural opportunities available throughout Pristina, including the National Theatre, described above. We also learned more about the “American Corner,” where Fulbrighters and other Americans meet with students, citizens, and tourists for formal presentations and informal discussions on all aspects of American culture. Naturally, I’ll blog about these Kosovaran and American events in the months to come. Expect to hear, too, about Jennifer Washeleski, Aferdita Krasniq, Paul Engelstad, Eileen Drummond, Chuck Harrison, and Svetlana Breca, the US Embassy officers who coordinate such events and who provide briefings and on-going support for visiting professors like Dave and me.

Feminist Theory, Flexibility, and a Trip to the Mall

January 30, 2012

In preparing for this teaching adventure, I completed all readings and drew up my syllabi before leaving MSU, but today I began preparing class sessions, which begin February 15.

Of course, my syllabi notwithstanding, flexibility will be key.  I won’t know until I meet my students exactly what they need or how far they have progressed as MA students.  The first unit in my 20^th-century American lit class will, I hope, allow for such flexibility.

For the first nine weeks, the students will explore a single broad theme, “Marriage, Family, and the American Dream,” a theme that will give continuity to their work and facilitate comparative analysis.  To sharpen that thematic focus, the first week will feature feminist theory applied to Susan Glaspell’s one-act play Trifles, to Zora Neale Hurston’s short story “Sweat,” and to Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story “Sexy.”

If it turns out that students already have a good grounding in early feminists and theorists such as Wollstonecraft, Fuller, Woolf, Beauvoir, Ellman, and Showalter, then we can jump right into these three works, which span the century: 1916 for Glaspell, 1926 for Hurston, 1999 for Lahiri.  On the other hand, if the students lack this theoretical background, then I will introduce the feminist critique of the patriarchal order and its oppression and suppression of women, and I will sketch gynocriticism as a framework for evaluating works written by women.

Either way, these works will help experienced readers review feminist theories and reading strategies, or provide more inexperienced students access to female characters who suffer physical and psychic battering or sexual objectification, yet who overcome brutish husbands or hypocritical lovers with their intelligence and strength.

Their triumphs over the patriarchal order also involve breaking laws or ignoring social mores, so we should have some interesting class discussions accounting for our sympathy and admiration for characters that conventional patriarchs might label as criminals or sluts.  To help students to discover the ambiguity surrounding each woman’s situation and their own ambivalence in responding to the women’s actions, I will rely on journaling prompts as homework and on small group work so that students may arrive inductively at their feminist insights.

After spending the morning planning approaches to this great stuff, I set out with Dave McTier to enjoy the sun and to visit Albi Mall (see gallery below).  I enjoyed the sun but much prefer the old markets all over town to the glitz of the mall.

**Click on the first picture to scroll through the gallery in a larger format.

Albi Mall, Pristina

CoffeeShop Company, Albi Mall, Pristina

Photo Tour 1: Campus & City

On the way to shopping today, Dave and I cut across campus. Here are shots from campus and beyond.

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Introductions

The following pictures show my new “digs” (I’ll move in tomorrow) and my new friend and fellow Fulbright colleague, Dr. David McTier*, associate professor of drama from Sam Houston State University.

*Click here to check out Dave’s Kosovo blog.

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Photo 1: Yours truly in coffee shop | Photo 2: Dr. Dave McTier at the coffee shop

Photo 3: Corner of dorm room | Photo 4: The lovely loo; it’s twice the size you can see here and has a nice shower