Read the 2011 English@Minnesota as a PDF - Department of ...

Nabil Matar
wants to
change
history
english@minnesota l
T
his October, Professor of English Nabil Matar celebrated the 25th anniversary
of what he terms his “birthday”—the day his life began, again, after exactly
six months in captivity during Lebanon’s civil war. Then an associate
professor at the American University of Beirut, Matar was abducted by
members of an armed militia. Numerous American University faculty were kidnapped
during the war; Matar was one of the lucky few to emerge alive.
The day after his release Matar was back at work, welcomed by the colleagues and
students who together had shut down the University in protest after his kidnapping;
but he would not be staying—the end of the war was not in sight (it would last four
more years). He had been a scholar of seventeenth-century English religious poetry,
trained at Cambridge University, but after his release his research interest would
change dramatically. “I couldn’t relate any longer,” Matar recalls in a Lind Hall
interview this fall, “to the kind of religious imagination that I had really admired in
English poetry and prose. Spiritually, I changed. I could not keep my . . . ” he pauses,
locates the word, “soul in my work.”