About

I teach French to teenagers in the southwest suburbs of Chicago. What I’m up to in a given month is on the now page; this is the longer story behind it: how I got here, which took more than a decade away, a doctorate I didn’t finish, and a country I made a home in and then left. For most of that decade I was certain I was headed somewhere else. The route is the part worth telling, mostly for what it got wrong.

I started at a community college, which I have never once regretted; it taught me early that prestige and substance are not the same thing, a confusion I’ve since watched cost people a great deal. From there I transferred and took a degree in history, with no settled idea of what it was for. I loved two rooms above all the others, the classroom and the library, and the way out looked obvious: become a professor, and you keep both for life. You teach, and you get all the hours you could want with your books.

So I went to graduate school, and then into a doctoral program, and made the history of the French empire in North Africa my corner of it. I read more widely than I was meant to: colonial Latin America one semester, modern Africa the next, well past the exams that were supposed to fence me into a single field. I worked in archives in France and Tunisia. I wrote most of a dissertation on the far-right settler politics of colonial Tunisia, a place strange enough to have held, for much of its history, more Italian settlers than French. I was good at it. And underneath the work sat a conviction I had never once examined: that I had been born for this, that the title at the end of it was simply mine, that anything short of it would be a falling-off. Nobody ever says this to you outright. In a certain kind of student it assembles itself, quietly, out of praise.

Before I finished, I took a job coordinating programs at an American research center in Tunis, to see, I told myself, what all that reading and teaching looked like once it was put to use. I expected a detour. It redrew the whole map.

The work was the invisible kind. I learned the machinery that brings scholarship to life and is never once seen by the people it serves: grant compliance and funding streams, the diplomacy between an American academy and a Tunisian one that did not share its assumptions, the patience it takes to fold a roomful of strong personalities into something like a coalition. Every fellowship a scholar wins was first fundraised by somebody; every event was financed and staffed and made to run by people whose names appear nowhere. When that work is done well it is invisible, and learning to do it taught me more about how the world actually holds together than the dissertation ever did.

Tunisia gave me more than a job. My French stopped being a subject and became the language I lived in; I learned Arabic the way you learn a thing you can no longer step out of. And I met the woman I’m going to marry.

Then the certainty came apart. I’d like to hand you one clean cause and I can’t. It was the dissertation, and the country, and the self I’d built on top of both, all giving way around the same time. The dissertation I left a single step from the end: four chapters drafted, only the introduction and the conclusion still to write, and I stopped. I had quit believing in it. I’d come to see the archive I loved as a record kept, and shaped, by a violent state; I’d come to feel that history is closer to an act of creation than to description, and I no longer wanted to spend a life adding a fragment of a fragment to the pile. So I left the program, moved back to the Midwest after more than a decade gone, and spent a long stretch not knowing who I was without the future I had assumed I would have.

Putting it back together, I noticed a thing I might have seen at twenty-two if anyone had let me. The parts of that whole long career that had actually fed me were the hours I spent teaching, and teaching is what I had wanted first of all, before the ladder, before I was talked up it on the reasonable-sounding grounds that anyone who could profess shouldn’t settle for a classroom. So I came back to the classroom on purpose. A year of substituting first—a different subject and a different roomful of strangers most days—and then a French position at the school I graduated from, which turns out to be a longer story than it has any right to be.

The week has other rooms in it. I volunteer, and for about six months I also worked part-time for a township, the kind of small local government that keeps a food pantry stocked and covers a month’s rent for a family about to lose its home. My part was grants and paperwork, the unglamorous work that lets a small unit of government be trusted with public money. And I write, slowly, and in public. The rest of this site is what that looks like, and what I take it to be for has a page of its own.

I spent more than a decade, and three countries, getting to a classroom in the district I came up in, to teach, which is the thing I’d wanted before I learned to think it too small. I don’t read that as a circle closing, or as a waste, though on a given day it can look like either. The half-finished degree, the French and Arabic I think in, the back rooms of a research center and a township: all of it walks into the room with me now, in a job my younger self had been taught to file under consolation prize. He had it backwards, and a fair amount else besides; I’m still finding out how much.