American Studies Week: Clyde Forsberg

November 19, 2013

Tell us about your professional background and education.

 

Education

Ph.D. Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada (1994)

19th-Century American Social and Cultural History, Canadian Religious History 1850 to the present, Central European and Radical Reformation. Dissertation: “In Search of the Historical Nephi: The Book of Mormon, Evangelicalism(s), and Antebellum American Popular Culture c. 1830.” Subsequently published by Columbia University Press (2004) as Equal Rites: The Book of Mormon, Masonry, Gender, and American Culture.

M.A. University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada (1990)

Religious Studies.Biblical/Literary Criticism, 19th-Century American Religious Imagination. M.A. Thesis: "The Roots of Early Mormonism: An Exegetical Approach." Governor General of Canada Gold Medal Nominee.

B.Ed. (certification), University of Calgary (1988)

Secondary Social Studies.Alberta College of Teachers, 1988.Ontario College of Teachers, 2000.

B.A. (First Class Honors), University of Calgary (1985)

Religious Studies, Biblical Studies, Medieval Jewish and Islamic Studies. Honours Thesis: "Sa'adiaGaon'sJudaeo-Arabic Translation of the Hebrew Bible."

 

Academic Experience

Professor, American and European Studies Department, American University of Central Asia/Bard University, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, 2013 - present

Assistant Professor, Department of English and American Studies/Adult Education Program, Oxford College/Aletheia University, Tamsui, Taiwan, 2008 - 2012.

Research Associate, Taiwan George Leslie Mackay Study Group, 2010 – present.

Instructor, Global Education Center, UCH-CEU Universidad Cardenal Herrera, Valencia, Spain, Taiwan Branch, National Taiwan University, 2011 – 2012.

Assistant Professor, American Culture and English Language and Literature Department(s), FatihUniversitesi, Istanbul, Turkey, 2004-2008.

Visiting Faculty Fellow, American Studies Department, American University of Central Asia, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, 2003-04.Director, Writing Center.

Lecturer, Durham Community College, Oshawa, Ontario, Canada, 2002 -2003.

Lecturer, History Department, Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario, Canada, 1998-2003.

Adjunct Assistant Professor, History Department/Continuing and Distance Education/Correctional Service of Canada, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada, 1994- 2003.

 

Why did you decide to work at AUCA?

I know the university very well, having taught there in the capacity of an Open Society Institute and Civic Education Project Visiting Faculty Fellow in 2003-2004. Although I left the university to take a full-time, tenure-track position at a university in Turkey, I never forgot the university or the students. Several of my former AUCA students in American Studies have gone on to graduate studies in the field and related fields at prestigious European and American universities. Quite by accident, I found myself once again in Bishkek, but to be in a Kyrgyz and Kazakh movie in which I play myself—an American jazz musician who visits the country, and although he does not speak Russian, he makes a huge number of local musical friendships that will (and have!) last a lifetime. (The movie, which will be released shorted, was written and directed by Bayan Sarygulov, and it is entitled “Pax Americana.”) Although I had taken a position at a private Saudi university, after shooting my scenes for the movie, and having paid AUCA a brief visit to see some of my former colleagues, my wife and I decided that we might like to remain in Kyrgyzstan. The university was very quick to offer me a full professorship in American Studies, now European and American Studies. I have been at AUCA now for almost a year.  I most enjoy the students, who, in my view, are among the best I have taught in my twenty years of university teaching. I was also most impressed by the progress that the university had made and its affiliation with Bard University. That AUCA is now certified, grants a Bard University degree and diploma, and is still the best Western university in the region, these were all very important to my decision to return. Of course, I am delighted to be playing jazz once again with all my olds friends. However, the nice thing about that now is that I speak fluent Russian and we can communicate off the stage, as well as on it. Finally, my wife CholponAlieva is Kyrgyz. We speak Russian at home. Our two children, Acacia (who just turned six) and Attila (who is three and a half) love Kyrgyzstan and the chance to get acquainted with the Kyrgyz side of the family, The story of my return to Kyrgyzstan and AUCA is complex, so much so that I felt compelled to write a book about it. This new Forsberg travel memoir is entitled, Savageries of the Academy Abroad: My Life Among the Headhunters of Presbyterian Taiwan and Narrow Escape from a Saudi Arabian Prison Thereafter. It will come out next year, with a little luck and once a suitable publisher is found.

 

Which courses do you teach? What methods of teaching do you follow?

I have taught a wide array of undergraduate and graduate courses in the Humanities and Social Sciences, in part because of a career spent largely at either new or private universities. I began, mind you, teaching at Queen’s University where I also took my Ph.D. in American, Canadian, and European History. The Queen’s University history department, when I was there, had some of the best minds in the field Religious History in the world. I had three Ph.D. fields, one of which had to be in a different geographical location. The idea was to create both a specialist and generalist. This alone has always made me extremely competitive, allowing me to teach with a certain authority, on a wide arrange of topics. There is also an important connection between my artistic or musical life and my academic work. Unlike many university instructors who may know their field but have not taken the time to study Education, I spent two years in the Education Department at the University of Calgary (at the post-graduate level), where I first became acquainted with such things as student-centred learning, learning styles, metacognition and its application to enhanced learning, various classroom management techniques, oral and aural evaluation methods, and statistics. Since then, I have added to this ESL, EFL, Content and Integrated Learning, IT, multimedia and the classroom, and, finally, the application of music to language acquisition and elocution. (While in Taiwan at one of its oldest Western-style universities, I used music to help my Taiwanese students overcome a number of hurdles in their study of English as a Second Language. The aforementioned are but some of the methods I follow. See below the courses I teach and have taught. As anyone will tell you, my classroom and teaching methods are quite different, possibly unique, for all the reasons stated above. For me, it might be said, that “all the classroom is a stage, every stage a classroom.”

 

Courses Taught at AUCA (2013):

First Year Seminar (Core Program)

Orientation/Writing in the Disciplines

American Mass Media

Jazz History

New Religious Movements

Theories and Perspectives in American Studies: Minorities and Resistance

American History Survey, 1865 to the Present

European History

 

(2003 – 2004):

Popular Religion, Culture, and Literature

Colonial America

Environmental History

Introduction to American Studies

Advanced Composition: Academic Writing

 

You also perform as a jazz musician. Tell us, please, why did you choose this exact genre of music? Why do you like it? 

I am a professional jazz musician with a Ph.D. from one of the finest universities in Canada, having played all throughout Canada and much of the United States, England, Ireland, Turkey, Taiwan, and, of course, Central Asia. I have played on a number of jazz and rock albums (CDs), several either nominated for national music awards or winning. My own contribution to jazz has been what I term “jazz theatre,” a combination of story-telling and improvisational jazz. Beginning in 2000, I wrote and produced five original plays on various historical and social issues as an experiment in musical (jazz) theatre and academic monologue, influenced by the new narrative history--Paul Johnson and Sean Wilentz’s The Kingdom of Matthias (Oxford 1995) in particular--and by a desire to bring the university classroom to the public rather than the reverse. The first such “jazz musical” was based on the Canadian Ice Storm in 1998. Two of the five appeared at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa and received national attention for their timely, social commentary, originality, and artistry. The second, a play in honor of Louis Armstrong on his 100^th birthday and entitled “Not Black and White,” is where I talk about how jazz came into my life, why the trumpet, and my general understanding of jazz as a liberation theology. Three more plays followed this one, the last of these based on my life in Central Asia and Turkey after leaving Canada in 2003. All five playswere published as Playing It By Ear: The Jazz-Theatre of Clyde R. Forsberg Jr. (Xlibris, Division of Random House, 2010).

 

To be clear--I do not “like it.” I LOVE IT. Jazz and the trumpet are who I am. History is something I do. The same passion that I have for jazz, I bring with me to the classroom. I never know exactly what I will say or do, because teaching for me, not unlike a fine jazz performance, is a group composition. In the same way that I listen the bass and drums, or the pianist and vocalist, I am inclined to listen to my students for what they might say and then tailor everything I do to fit with that. Teaching for me is as much a jazz performance as any jazz performance ought to leave us with something important to think about. Indeed, both my M.A. and Ph.D. supervisors were gifted musicians in their own right. Their written English was SO good, in part, because they both had such a finely tuned ear for music. The two, of course, are related. It was a discovery that helped me immeasurably in my own struggle to write and publish at a very high level.

 

Who are AUCA students? How do they differ from students of other universities?

AUCA students were different from my Canadian students at Queen’s University in both a positive and negative sense. But what they may have lacked, they more than made up for in ways that I had never seen. Their sincerity and passion was inspiring, to say the least. Working in a second language, they could not read as much as my Canadian students, for example. But they also set to work and by the time they graduated could compete with the best of them. I do have a soft stop in my heart for Central Asians who, in general, and even the former Soviet Union and how, in many ways, it created a very unique group of people in this part of the world. I fear that Central Asia may lose some of its charm, much of that a consequence of the Soviet experience, as it moves steadily toward a somewhat American understanding of the individual and society. I am not pining in any sense for a return to the “good old days.” But I do fall in with the likes of Paul Robeson and Langston Hughes. When Hughes came to Central Asia in the 1930s, he felt more welcome here than in his native United States. Born in the United States, but raised in Canada, I straddled the border of those two countries most of my life; until I came to Central Asia, where, for some unknown reason, I felt very much “at home.” My friend and New York City jazz pianist, Joel A. Martin, also came to Kyrgyzstan about the same time I did and had a similar experience. He says that only in Bishkek can you be a perfect stranger and feel right at home. I sincerely hope that this never changes. AUCA students bring that same quality and feeling of acceptance and openness to strangers and their strange ideas. Regardless of how many, or how few, pages they can read and understand in a given week, my students give me reason for hope and wonder.

 

Why is the American Studies department interesting?

Sadly, as you may know, the department and program is being closed. Not enough students. The reasons for this are understandable in some respects, but tragic in some others. American Studies is unique in its breadth of knowledge and expertise, but most of all its interdisciplinarity. American Studies scholars are from a variety of disciplines and, these days, a truly international community of very brave and innovative scholars. I would describe American Studies as the conscience of the university because it tackles the hard questions, the cultural dilemmas, issues such as class, race, gender, and sexuality. It has the courage to question what we all take for granted, such as the real merits of modern western democracies, imperialism (past, present, and future), both the pros and cons under the Soviets, the history of ideas—both Western and Eastern—and the degree to which everything and everyone can be connected in a variety of ways. American Studies can change lives in ways that transcend the usual drive we all have to improve our socio-economic status. American Studies is “interesting” because it offers so much more than a job! And whether an American Studies degree leads to gainful employment or not, the answer to that question is an unequivocal yes. I say this because of one simple and undeniable fact: my former American Studies students are nearly all not only employed, but employed in a variety of fascinating jobs, living the good life in Europe and America, and largely because of their decision to enroll in American Studies. For some reason, though, this fact has been lost on both students and administration. To me, AUCA with American Studies is like shashlik without meat.

 

Please tell us a little about yourself. How do you spend your free time? Do you have any hobbies?

        I don’t have hobbies, I have alternative professions. When people ask me if music is a hobby, I’m quite offended, actually. Jazz is not my hobby. It is my life. I have two legs, not because I couldn’t get around on one. Two legs are better than one. The right is not a hobby, or the left for that matter. Two eyes, two ears, two hands—and yet I could see with one, hear with just one, pick up and hold on to something with one hand if need be. And so, having more than one professional portfolio should not seem all that strange. I have been called a kind of Renaissance man because of my music and the fact that I have a Ph.D. in history. But, I am also an apprenticed cabinet maker, working for a German fine furniture company for several years before choosing to go to university. (I started university when I was twenty-four.) I had my own furniture and construction company, too. I built my first house when I was twenty-five. I restored a Canadian Heritage Home when I did my Ph.D. I can still go into any professional cabinet shop, anywhere in the world, and get a job if I need to. How this happened, in part, is a logical consequence of having an architect for a father. My grandfather was also a fine craftsman. So, it’s in the blood. Music, and my artistic side, is very much a factor of my mother (a fine painter in her own right), her ,mother a pianist who played the piano for silent films where she lived. I also love, and miss, gardening, having built a pagoda that caught the interest of Canada’s House and Garden magazine—though I left Canada just as they were approaching me about a story on what people in the neighborhood we calling the “inside-outside room.” I also design and built remote control airplanes, and fly them. If I have a hobby as such, it would be that, I suppose.

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