Dr. Ziad Abu-Rish
The Ohio University Honors Tutorial College recently selected Dr. Ziad Abu-Rish, Assistant Professor of History, as the recipient for the 2016-17 Outstanding New Tutor Award.
This honor “recognizes outstanding tutors who are in their first three years of teaching tutorials.”
Tutorials form a signifianct portion of the HTC curriculum. As HTC describes it, “The tutorial is at the heart of the HTC experience. Each semester, students enroll in at least one class that is held either one-on-one or in a small group with a professor…. Instead of lectures, tutorials are driven by spirited conversations between the student and the professor. These specially tailored tutorials are rigorous, and as students progress, they may choose what they would like to research or study in a given tutorial. The content of a tutorial does not have to mirror that of an existing Ohio University course.”
Nominations for the award are solicited from HTC students and directors of study. An awards committee, comprised of the HTC dean, other administrators, and a student representative review prospective recipients of the award on the basis of nominations, student evaluations, and observations by colleagues.
Abu-Rish joined the History Department in Fall 2014. He offers a range of courses on the history of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. By the end of Spring 2017, Abu-Rish had worked with four HTC History majors, offering five tutorials and directing one senior thesis. Some of his tutorial topics include “Communal Relations in the Modern Middle East” and “Women, the Press, and Social Change in the Modern Middle East.”
In 2015-16, Abu-Rish directed HTC History alumna Katie Conlon’s senior thesis, titled “‘Neither Men nor Completely Women:’ The 1980 Armagh Dirty Protest and Republican Resistance in Northern Irish Prisons.” Abu-Rish is currently scheduled to offer two new one-on-one tutorials in Fall 2017: one with an HTC political science major on the history of U.S. policy in the Middle East and another with an HTC journalism major on the history of commercial and political strategic communication in the Middle East.
Abu-Rish serves as the director of the newly-created Middle East and North Africa Studies Certificate. During Fall 2017, he will offer HIST 3371: Middle East History, 1500-Present, which provides a survey of the political, economic, social, and cultural history of the modern Middle East and North Africa region.
For more on Abu-Rish’s teaching and research interests, visit his department website.
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