This past February Dr. Barker went to Pakistan to teach at a women’s university in the city of Rawalpindi for six months. This talk is about her experience of living and working there during the ongoing political crisis that continues to plague the country. Specifically it focuses on how political life in Pakistan today has changed the canvas of daily life in Islamabad and how it impacted her teaching and the life of her students. Dr. Barker will also discuss what it is like these days being an American in a country where we have been persona non grata for over a decade.

 

Adele Barker works in the field of post-Stalinist literature and film. She is the author of five books on Russian and Soviet Culture most recently Consuming Russia: Popular Culture Sex and Society since Gorbachev (Duke Univ Press, 1999), and The Russia Reader: History, Culture, Politics, co- edited with Bruce Grant (Duke Univ Press, 2010). Her nonfiction work Not Quite Paradise (Beacon Press 2010) recounts her life as a Fulbright scholar in Sri Lanka against the background of the civil war and her subsequent return to the island after the tsunami. She recently spent six months in Islamabad, Pakistan teaching at Fatima Jinnah Women's University in Rawalpindi. Her current work of nonfiction focuses on the experience of teaching during this fragile time in Pakistani political life.

 

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