Schaar Home Page

Stuart Schaar
Professor of History
Office: 507S Whitehead
Office Hours:
Phone: (718) 951-5305
email: sschaar@brooklyn.cuny.edu

Born in Williamsburg , Brooklyn, I grew up in Revere Beach near Boston and in the Bronx, New York right near the Yankee Stadium. I graduated from William Howard Taft High School and got my B.A. in History from City College on 135^th Street in Manhattan. I then went on to Princeton University where I received a joint Ph.D. in western European history and Middle East Studies. I specialized in North African history from Carthaginian times to the present and wrote my doctoral thesis on “Conflict and Change in Nineteenth Century Morocco”. I was a guest student for 9 months at the North African Center at the University of Aix-en-Provence in France and first went to North Africa on a three month tour more than forty years ago. I wrote my dissertation and lived in Morocco for two years on a Ford Foundation grant. I landed my first job in the Comparative Tropical History Program at the University of Wisconsin (Madison) and then worked and wrote articles for two years for the American Universities Field Staff covering North Africa, the Middle East and East Africa, living for six months in Nairobi, Kenya and lecturing at the universities of Nairobi, Dar es-Salam (Tanzania) and Makere in Uganda. As part of the AUFS touring scholar program, I lectured for a year at 10 universities throughout the United States including the California Institute of Technology, Dartmouth, Indiana, Michigan State, Southern University, Tulane, Wisconsin, etc. I began teaching at Brooklyn College in 1968 and have been here ever since. I have taught courses dealing with global history in addition to courses on the Middle East. In recent years my main research interest has revolved around Tunisia in the 1920’s, an exciting time in that small North African country when thousands of North African workers and soldiers returned from the war front in Europe and changed the society profoundly. I have lived a total of 15 years out of the past forty in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa and try to spend at least 4 months a year overseas, something I have to do to keep in touch.

Recent Publications

Honors and Awards

“Orientalism at the Service of Imperialism,” [originally published in 1979 and again in 1980] in A.L. Macfie, Orientalism A Reader, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000).

“Tahar Haddad, A Tunisian Intellectual [1920’s],” The Maghreb Review (London) vol. 21, nos 3-4 (1996) [published June 1998], 240-255. Co-authored with Eqbal Ahmad.

The Algerian Impasse, co-edited with Abdelleh Hammoudi (Princeton: Center of International on the Algerian Studies Monograph Series, No. 8, 1995).

“Creation of Mass Political Culture in Tunisia [After WWI],” The Maghreb Review vol. 18, nos. 1-2 (1993) [published 1995], 2-17.

“M’hamed Ali: Tunisian Labor Organizer,” co-authored with Eqbal Ahmad in Edmund Burke, III, ed., Struggle and Survival In the Modern Middle East (Berkeley, CA:University of California Press, 1993), pp. 191-204.

Irangate: The Middle East Connections,” in Hooshang Amirahmadi, ed., The United States and the Middle East: A Search for New Perspectives (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), pp. 177-210.

“The Dangers of Nuclear Proliferation and War in the Middle East,” Joseph Gerson, ed., The Deadly Connection: Nuclear War and U.S. Intervention (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1986), pp. 162-166.

“King Hassan’s Alternatives,” in I. William Zartman, ed., Man, State, and Society in the Contemporary Maghrib (New York: Praeger,1973), pp. 229-244.

“The Barbary Coast (c. 500B.C.-A.D. 639),” ch. 3 in The Horizon History of Africa (New York: American Heritage Publishing Co., Inc., 1971).

“Rebellion, Revolution and Religious Intermediaries in Some Nineteenth Century Islamic States,” in Kal Silvert, ed., Churches and States: The Religious Institution and Modernization (New York: AUFS, 1967), pp. 121-143.

John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation grant for research on Algeria (1998).

John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation grant to organize an international conference in London (February 6-8, 1998) on the Algerian civil war (1997).

John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation grant to co-produce a film on the killing of Algerian journalists with the prize-winning Algerian film director Merzac Allouache August 1997. Shown on Arte Franco-German channel in western Europe and Algeria (1995). Reviewed favorably in the French daily newspaper Liberation.

Danielle Mitterand FRANCE-LIBERTE Foundation grant for a conference I organized with 18 North African women in Tunis on “Violence Against North African Women” (1995).

Swiss Foundation for Peace and Development grant to co-sponsor a conference on North African civil society at Princeton University in 1995. Conference proceedings published in Arabic in 1998 (1995).

John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation grant to organize a conference at the center of International Studies, Princeton University on the Algerian crisis. Edited summation of the conference published in 1995 (1994).