Darya Foroohar, ‘20

October 2019

This year, BHSEC has welcomed many new faculty members in multiple departments. One of these new professors is Melissa Turoff, who is finishing her Ph.D. in History at the University of California, Berkeley. She has taught at NYU, Rutgers University, and LaGuardia Community College; at BHSEC she teaches Sophomore Seminar and Global History. I met with her to discuss her thoughts on her experiences at BHSEC and otherwise, as well as her advice for students and aspirations for the future.

Can you just describe why you chose to teach at BHSEC?

This is gonna be kind of a long story, but I promise I’ll get to it. So when I went to grad school at Berkeley, I thought I wanted to teach at, like, a fancy research university, and mostly focus on being a fancy historian– and I still like that idea– but I’d never taught before. I’d private tutored a little bit, but I got into the classroom and I was like, oh my god, this is so much more important than writing articles that five people in an ivory tower will read and occasionally assign. It’s, like, teaching students how to think, and therefore impacting how I think, and that exchange– I was totally hooked on classroom teaching and teaching history and theory. So, once I realized that my priority was teaching, um, that kind of shifted my career goals, and then– I’m a native New Yorker, as you know, so another big drive for me was to find a school in New York I really wanted to teach at, and I wanted to do a lot of academics and some time on the market… I have a slight fear of living in the middle of nowhere; it’s not what makes me happy. My parents are here, my family’s here, my friends are here, and I love New York. It’s good to leave– I left for most of my twenties– but coming home, I was like, this is amazing. So, I wanted to be in New York, and then… the fact that you guys graduate with two years of college… I mean, when I went to school, of course college was expensive, but it’s ridiculously expensive, and when I was teaching at NYU before here, I had really wealthy students who were trying to graduate in three years, and losing a lot, because they couldn’t afford their fourth year at NYU. So even though I know that some students won’t enter as juniors, and go to colleges as freshmen and do all four years, the fact that you have a public school in New York City that’s free, where a lot of your teachers have Ph.Ds and who are all here because they want to be here, is a magical unicorn place to be and teach, and when I saw the job listing for this, I thought, “I gotta put my all into getting this job, because I want it. It’s for me.” And that’s my story.

I remember you talking about how at first you were a little upset that we didn’t have The Origin of Species for Darwin, so: If you could add any book to the [Sophomore Seminar] reading list, what would it be, and why?

Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth. Close tie with Edward Said’s Orientalism. I think that I would be assigning very few entire books, but I think that, that said, I was talking to Mark Williams and he was like, “you have to read a great book of science,” and it kind of struck me that, like, yeah, we should be reading books of science, we should be reading Darwin. Teaching it with the pushback and discussions from class has made me like this book a lot more. But I think for me, and this is why I’m excited to teach an elective at some point, a book that really focuses on race and imperialism that’s not a literary book would be good.

Going off of that, if you could an elective, what would it be?

I would teach a version of– and I want to say, by the way, I like this seminar sequence more and more as I read it. Every professor, you’ve taught your own class, and you’re like, “ugh, I have to teach someone else’s class.” But then you realize that there’s so many ways you can make it your own, and I’m really seeing that… My elective would be, um, I taught this class at the Galatan in NYU. It was a class called Orientalism, but it could really be a class called how we engage with others, in an imperial context, in terms of race, in terms of religion, and it’s based on this pretty seminal work by Edward Said published in 1978 called Orientalism. It’s all about how the west has constructed the east, and how the fascination with the east has kind of been matched by, or reached its height imperially, when the west was dominating the east imperially, and it’s not a coincidence. So it’s asking all these questions about knowledge production, and “can we decolonize our minds?” That’s what’s going on… I think it’s really interesting to think about how we construct knowledge and the political and economic structures that undercurrent the construction of everything from paintings to texts to, you know, media, to our video games, and stuff like that. So, I would teach a class on Orientalism that started in the 18th century, and focus on India and the Middle East, and understanding how these 18th century men engaged with that, and then culminate in this big critique, in this big important book from the 1970’s, which says that everything is kind of tainted by imperial bias. [Then I would] ask the question, does that throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak, and look at different ways people have thought to engage Said in this book, but also past it. How does Marx help us, how does structure: if everything is tainted by imperialism, we can’t decolonize the mind, what are we left with? Nothing, right? So what do we do? And we’re still in that place, right, of, “what do we do next to focus,” and I think it’s a really useful class. I’ve used a reader for it; it’s two, five pages– sometimes ten– of these really influential thinkers, but I would end with subaltern studies and postcolonial theory and race theory, and then end particularly with techno-orientalism, which is a discussion today of how we are fascinated by East Asia… We’re re-exoticising [the east] in some ways by making it this pseudo-utopian place of science and technology, and [I’d focus on] the imperial politics of that. We have real relations with China that are how culture is permeated with discussions on technology, a gap, are we being beat by the east, how does that make us feel as westerners, so there’s a lot there. That would be my class.

Do you think you’ll teach it next semester?

I don’t think so; I’m teaching seminar all year. I hope to teach it next year, but I also think that I’m finding my sea legs in seminar, and there’s something beneficial to teaching something a second time, so I’d be happy with whatever happens.

Lastly, what’s a piece of advice that you’d give to Bard students who are struggling or stressed out?

I didn’t sleep for all four years of high school, not for lack of trying, because I was stressed out too, but it seems like it’s getting worse. Talk to your professors, and the people around you. Come in when you’re really stressed out. For me, at least, I’m a human, and I believe in an intersectional classroom that exudes radical empathy… everyone, even the most talkative, seems on top of their work [student] is probably struggling. And there’s a tendency– I’ve had it, too, because I’m very outgoing and I seem like I have my stuff together, but sometimes we all don’t, and we’ve all probably been there, you know?… Most of the faculty I’ve met here, but especially the students, there’s a lot of stress, but there’s also a lot of empathy. So, don’t get in that tunnel of isolation and reach out and realize that your professors are humans, too. And, also, to offer some hope, because I’m pretty young-ish, kinda… it gets better. You get more choice after high school. You get to sleep in a little later, and probably your first year of college will be a cakewalk. At least, it was for me, compared to the pressure cookers that are New York City high schools. So that is my beacon of hope, that high school, junior/senior year, it’s a doozy. College is going to be stressful in different ways, but you have more choice, and you’re going to have more time. And always give yourself permission to take a week, or a month, or a year off. Always. That’s my advice.