NES Faculty

Gregory J. Bell
Lecturer in Arabic
email: gjbell@princeton.edu

I have been a Lecturer in Arabic here in the Department of Near Eastern Studies since 2007.  Prior to that, I worked at Princeton’s Institute for the Transregional Study of the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia.  My interest in Arabic and the Middle East stems from my time as a United States Peace Corps Volunteer in the Sultanate of Oman.  My research interests include modern Arabic literature as well as the Arabic language in all its facets.

I was born and raised in Ohio and attended Kenyon College, where I earned my BA and majored in Philosophy.  As the market for philosophers was somewhat soft when I graduated, I applied and was accepted for service in the Peace Corps.  I spent 1980-1982 living and working in the Sultanate of Oman.  My work there was in the field of public health and sanitation.  While in Oman, I learned the Omani dialect of Arabic, but found I could not read or understand the standard Arabic I saw in newspapers and heard on television or radio.  This experience of being illiterate was new and frustrating to me and, therefore, I resolved to study and master standard Arabic (al-Fusha) upon my return to the States.  I naïvely thought this would be a project of a year or two!

Back in the U.S., I began as one of the older students in Arabic 101 at The Ohio State University and eventually earned my MA in Arabic there in 1989.  I then went on to earn my PhD in Arabic and Islamic Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 2001.  I was fortunate in the course of my studies to be able to spend a summer studying Arabic in Jordan and a year in Cairo at the Center for Arabic Studies Abroad (CASA).  I also taught Arabic courses from first to fourth year at Ohio State and Penn.
My dissertation research focused on the poetry and thought of one of the more fascinating figures in modern Arabic letters, Mikhail Naimy (Nu`aymah).  My dissertation explores the influence of theosophical and other religious thought on Naimy’s writing.  Professor Roger Allen advised my dissertation work.
I currently have two articles forthcoming, one, a literary biography of Mikhail Naimy in an encyclopedic volume on modern Arab writers to be published by Harrassowitz, and the other an article on a famous short story by the Egyptian writer Yahya Haqqi, to appear in the Journal of Arabic Literature.

Here at Princeton I have taught ARA 101-102 and ARA 105-107, which I thoroughly enjoy.  It is exciting to help students progress from no knowledge of Arabic to novice and intermediate levels.  I hope that, as a non-native speaker who learned Arabic in the same way my students are learning it, I am able offer insights that will help them tackle Arabic.  In the spring of 2010, I will offer a new course on Arabic to English translation (ARA 308).

As is obvious, my original, naïve one- or two-year project of studying Arabic has turned into a lifetime engagement; however, it turns out that this is one of the things I like best about Arabic: one can always find new aspects of the language to explore and new challenges to take on.