Alumni Spotlight Series: Michael A. Zanger-Tishler ’18
The following interview is part of the Council on Middle East Studies’ Alumni Spotlight series featuring graduates from the Bachelor’s Degree in Modern Middle East Studies. Michael A. Zanger-Tishler graduated from Yale with a double major in Modern Middle East Studies and Ethics, Politics, and Economics in 2018.
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Sure! My name is Michael Zanger-Tishler, and I'm a PhD candidate in sociology and social policy at Harvard; I graduated from Yale with a joint degree in MMES and EP&E in 2018. Primarily, as a scholar, I study police, courts, and prisons in different countries and try to understand how the types of data different countries collect, share, and publish about these institutions shapes what we know about them.
How was your time at Yale? Can you share a few memories that you think might encapsulate your experience?
Yale for me was a really wonderful experience and an important intellectual environment. Just to name a few of my most memorable experiences in MMES, I took a course on state formation in the modern middle east with Jonathan Wyrtzen that piqued my interest in comparative historical methods and I still think about and return to when I do my research today; I was able to take a small 4 person course on modern Hebrew poetry with Hannan Hever (as well as participate in a Hebrew language literature reading group with him where we read texts in the original language); and I took a course on Middle East Uprisings with Zakia Salime, a visiting sociology professor from Rutgers. These experiences still stick with me as ideal types for what intellectual engagement and learning should be like.
How did you end up at Yale focusing on Middle East Studies?
I was really interested in language learning, and I wanted to get credit for taking language classes. I was also interested in interdisciplinary inquiry, and MMES was an excellent opportunity for me to learn how to think with different conceptual frameworks (literary theory, cultural studies, social science, etc).
How did your time at Yale and the MMES degree influence your life professionally and or personally?
For me, the MMES major and the sociology of the Middle East courses I took were really fundamental to my interest in comparative sociology and in getting a PhD in sociology (along with courses I took with Andrew Papachristos and Vesla Weaver about punishment in the United States). Additionally, as a social scientist, majoring in MMES has made me appreciative of the critical importance of area studies and cultural studies to understanding and doing good social science research. Reading foundational Arabic and Hebrew literary texts like Hayim Nachman Bialik and Mahmoud Darwish has deepened my appreciation for studying Israel/Palestine using social scientific techniques, and I encourage colleagues and undergraduate students to engage with sources outside of the traditional canon of social science to grow and deepen their work!
Can you tell us about your career after Yale and where you are now?
For the first year after graduating, I was a CASA Arabic fellow in Amman, Jordan, where I spent the year practicing Palestinian/Jordanian Arabic and learning more advanced formal Arabic. I then began my PhD in sociology and social policy at Harvard, where I am currently finishing up my dissertation. Though my work focuses more expansively beyond the Middle East, my dissertation has allowed me to read sources and conduct interviews in Hebrew and Arabic!
What advice would you give either to a current graduate student in MMES or an
undergraduate student who is considering focusing on the Middle East as an
undergrad or for graduate study?
I think the most important advice I can give is to study language and get as many chances as possible to use it! I was lucky to receive funding at Yale to study Arabic in Rabat and Dalyat Al-Carmel, and these experiences as well as studying Arabic as a CASA Arabic fellow after college and getting a chance to practice Hebrew for a year before college were critical for my development as a scholar of the middle east.