Features
‘Go Overseas, Do Something Different'
Historian heeds the advice of an academic adviser and builds a career rooted in her wide-ranging international experiences
BY TERESA PITMAN
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| Prof. Renée Worringer at home with her three Belgian shepherds. Photo by Martin Schwalbe |
What happens when you take a not-very-happy math and economics major from Minnesota's St. Olaf College and send her on an overseas semester to the Middle East?
It changes her life.
In Prof. Renée Worringer's case, that semester abroad started her on the road to becoming a history professor here at U of G and sparked a love of travel that has never faded.
During her Middle East semester, Worringer was based in Jerusalem but also travelled to Cairo, Istanbul and other places. Inspired by that experience, she went to Japan after graduation and worked there for three years, taking advantage of opportunities to visit other parts of Asia and Africa.
“My life in Minnesota had really been quite sheltered, and I grew up a lot over those years because I got to see so much of the world,” she says.
On her return to the United States, Worringer headed for the University of Chicago and spent the next 11 years doing her PhD.
“Because I was working on the history of the Ottoman Empire, I needed to learn Arabic and Turkish as well as Ottoman Turkish, which is now a dead language,” she explains.
She managed to combine her interest in Japan and Middle Eastern countries by doing her dissertation on how Japan's image became a model for reform and modernization in the Ottoman Empire.
Her research took her to Turkey, Syria, Egypt and Lebanon, but she wasn't able to go everywhere she'd hoped to. “Travel in the Middle East is difficult these days,” she says.
In case you haven't heard much about the Ottoman Empire (or thought it might be a chain of furniture stores specializing in padded footstools), Worringer is happy to explain. For nearly 600 years — right up through the First World War — the Ottoman Empire expanded and contracted but at one time covered much of Eastern Europe and the Middle East, plus parts of North Africa. Although the rulers were Muslim, they allowed the non-Muslim people in their lands to follow and practise their own religions.
“The Ottomans were involved with just about everyone,” she says. “Sometimes they were friends, sometimes they were at war. They brought together influences from the Persian, Turco-Mongolian, Byzantine and Arab cultures.”
After completing her dissertation, Worringer was hired by the University of Queensland in Australia, which was looking to develop an Islamic studies program. She loved Australia (although she acknowledges that she “couldn't get used to having Christmas and New Year's in the middle of summer”), but after working for four years to develop the program, she decided to look for another position. She was pleased to discover that U of G was seeking someone with expertise in Islamic history.
“There's so much interest in Islamic studies now, and the whole area has been under-represented,” says Worringer. “It's not just the international situation that has boosted interest, but it's also the fact that most western countries today have pretty substantial Muslim populations, and we need to understand their heritage.”
Sometimes that under-representation makes it difficult for university students, she says.
“For some, it may be the hardest history course they've ever taken because the names, dates and places are all unfamiliar. Islamic law is very different from the western law we know. Even the basic geography is often not clear — I use a lot of maps in my lectures.”
Worringer is currently writing a book based on her PhD research, but she's also developing another project that capitalizes on her wide-ranging international experiences: exploring the image of the wolf in various world cultures.
“The wolf is sometimes seen as a positive image, representing power, and other times seen as a negative,” she says.
Her research suggests that nomadic groups tended to have a positive image of the wolf, whereas those groups that had settled into agricultural communities and developed monotheistic religions had more negative wolf imagery.
“It isn't just that the wolf is the predator preying on their flocks,” she says. “The wolf becomes an avatar or servant of the devil, preying on people's souls.”
Worringer is also intrigued by those societies where the wolf has retained its positive image, even though the people are no longer nomadic. This includes Japan and First Nations communities in North America.
Why the interest in wolves? That's an easy question to answer — Worringer and her husband have three Belgian shepherds, large dogs that look a bit like wolves. Two of the dogs accompanied her to Australia and have now travelled to Canada; the third was Australian-bred.
Despite their size and appearance, these dogs not only don't prey on sheep but they've also won many competitions herding sheep and ducks. (Yes, ducks.) Right now, Worringer is using a neighbour's farm for training sessions, but she hopes to get some sheep of her own next spring so she can expand her training program on the couple's property near Fergus.
“These dogs herd differently than other dogs such as border collies,” she notes. “They were bred to walk with the shepherd, patrolling the flock and protecting it from predators, and they herd by sheer physical presence.”
Reflecting on her varied interests and the way they've come together in her life, Worringer can only thank the academic adviser who told her, when she was a bored and frustrated undergraduate student, to “go overseas, do something different.”
“That's the best advice I've ever had.”