Commencement 2020 profile: Rania Said

There was an energy in the air in late 2010, when Rania Said was in her final year at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Tunis.

The Arab uprising sparked that December in Tunisia, spreading across North Africa and West Asia as citizens revolted against authoritarianism. While the Arab Spring, as it was later known, had mixed results in other nations, in Tunisia it led to lasting reforms, including the ouster of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the dissolution of the ruling party and the political police, and the establishment of a constitutional democratic republic.

Initially, Said witnessed the protests but was too afraid to participate. The uprising stalled the normal activities of daily life and she returned to her hometown of Msaken, two hours south, while her school friends joined the protesting throngs in the capital.

“It was a political awakening for many Tunisians, including myself,” she said.

Prior to the uprising, Said only paid attention to politics on the international scale, considering national politics a cause lost to authoritarianism. After the president’s ouster, Said returned to Tunis and this time joined the occupation of Tunis’ public spaces — an experience she will never forget. She met activists from all over the country and from different political organizations, all of whom joined together to demand real change.

“We cooked together, sang protest songs, and imagined a better future for Tunisia and the region,” she reflected. “I saw similar dynamics in Occupy Wall Street when I first came to the U.S. in 2011.”

That experience not only changed Said’s perspectives, it gave her a focus for her academic work. She recently earned her doctorate in comparative literature from Binghamton University, with a focus on women’s narratives from the Arab uprising. She specifically looks at “memory studies,” focusing on the way that women activists and intellectuals represented themselves and their cities during the uprisings, she explained.

Friends and mentors

Said came to Binghamton University as a Fulbright Scholar, attracted by the courses offered by the late Professor Gisela Brinker-Gabler and comparative literature Professor and Chair Luiza Moreira. She intended to study women’s travel writing, but it was the first time she had really traveled herself.

While at Binghamton, she made friends from all over the world. International students are a close-knit bunch at the University, and Said enjoyed learning new recipes from her fellow students’ home cultures — particularly ramen or curry-related, since Chinese and Indian cuisine can be hard to come by in her hometown. Many of her friends have since graduated and scattered to Washington, D.C., New York City, Toronto or India, where they are writing books, teaching literature and pursuing amazing career paths, Said noted. She’s honored to have been part of their journey.

Her time at Binghamton also introduced her to scholars and artists she would not otherwise have met, and books she wouldn’t have found on her own, she said.

While at the University, she also worked as a doctoral assistant for the Institute for Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention, where she helped organize events and worked on a report concerning the mechanisms of mass atrocity prevention in North Africa and West Asia. The job was an ideal fit, giving Said practical training in political issues that matter deeply to her, and coinciding with her research on the Arab uprising.

Moreira, her advisor, provided a well of support, as did assistant professors Jeroen Gerrits and Giovanna Montenegro, who helped her prepare for interviews. Some of her most memorable classes were taught by comparative literature Professor Brett Levinson and now-retired faculty member William Haver. In the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Studies, associate professors Omid Ghaemmaghami and Mary Youssef proved to be “amazing mentors,” she said.

“It means a lot to know that people care about what you do and that they are willing to help you make your work better,” she said.

Moreira described Said as a committed scholar of English, French and Arabic literatures, and a talented teacher of all three languages.

For that last, she remembered Said teaching a morning class on Montesquieu’s Persian Letters. Although it was 8:30 a.m., by the time Moreira arrived Said had the projector going, a pile of handouts in circulation and a room full of attentive students.

“The class was a model of what a class on world literature should be,” Moreira said.

Said had her first teaching experience in 2009, when she taught English as a foreign language to teenagers at Sadiki College in Tunis. In 2019, she returned to Tunis to teach English at MedTech, the engineering school of South Mediterranean University, before returning to Binghamton to finish her doctorate.

Her doctoral defense drew a Zoom audience of more than 40 people — her friends and family in Tunisia, friends and colleagues from throughout North Africa and West Asia, and former Binghamton students from all over the globe, Moreira recalled.

Now that she has earned her PhD, Said is headed to the University of Massachusetts Boston, where she has a postdoctoral teaching fellowship with the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures. She will be teaching Arabic language and literature this fall, and also plans to dedicate time to translation and creative writing.

“I am looking forward to this new chapter of my life, but Binghamton will always be in my heart,” she said.