What do you know? Yale’s Dr. T aims to fill some gaps
Text by Lisa Prevost, YaleNews
What do the American playwright Susan Glaspell, the renowned African blues guitarist Ali Farka Touré, and the Southeast Asian dyeing technique known as ikat have in common?
They are all things worth knowing about, says Yale’s Shawkat Toorawa, the endlessly curious creator of a campus series known as “The dr. T projecT.”
Every Tuesday afternoon, Toorawa, the Brand Blanshard Professor of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, turns up in the same classroom in the Humanities Quadrangle and delivers a 30-minute presentation on an eclectic trio of cultural items from around the world.
The series, whose tagline is “three things worth knowing,” is free for anyone interested in attending. Complimentary San Pellegrino and Walker’s Shortbread are served, courtesy of the Whitney Humanities Center. And on any given week, the audience may include various combinations of Yale College students, graduate students, faculty, and New Haven residents.
For Toorawa, the series is a labor of love. To him, it matters little whether three people turn up or 20.
“Because I know they want to be there,” he said. “They’re not getting a grade. They’re not getting any credit. They’re there for the pure and simple reason that they’re interested in learning about three things.”
Toorawa’s intention for the project isn’t to persuade people that these are things he thinks everybody should know — there’s no shaming or finger pointing involved — but rather, things that are worthwhile to know.
Each week he spends three to four hours preparing one literary item (he is also a professor of comparative literature), one musical item, and one general item. He summarizes pertinent information about each for an onscreen presentation that also includes related YouTube clips, album covers, portraits, maps, movie posters, poetry selections, and book covers.
“I mainly pick things that I know something about, but in preparing, I inevitably myself learn new things,” Toorawa said.
Take, for example, the term Fata Morgana, the subject of a presentation last December. Toorawa knew it referred to the illusion of seeing a distant ship appear to hover above the water at the horizon. And he knew that it was the Italian name for Morgan le Fay, the enchantress in the legend of King Arthur. But while preparing, he discovered something new: that some people explained away the legendary ghost ship “The Flying Dutchman” as a Fata Morgana.
Toorawa started the dr. T project 15 years ago while an associate professor at Cornell University. As he wrote in a column for the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2010, the project grew out of his frustration when he realized that the authors, films, or musicians he would reference often drew blank looks from his undergrads. He took it upon himself to try and fill those gaps in knowledge. (The “Three Things Worth Knowing” tagline came from the Chronicle’s title for that column.)
Originally, he served English tea, along with shortbread, at the sessions. He continued that ritual when he brought the project with him to Yale in 2016. But post-pandemic health concerns put a halt to the communal sharing of tea, hence the switch to individual cans of Elderflower Pressé, then San Pellegrino.
He has some ground rules for the project. He keeps a running list of potential topics, but he does not take suggestions from attendees.
“The whole point is people are coming to learn things they don’t know about, not telling me things that they already know about,” he said.
He never features anything related to his professional areas of study, primarily classical and medieval Arabic literature.
“I don’t want it to be construed as advertising for me as a scholar or for my classes,” he said.
He doesn’t distinguish between so-called high and low culture.
“For example, I’ll play a piece of classical music and then show whatever Looney Tunes cartoon it played in or how it was used in the background of a commercial,” he said.
And he usually opens the first session of the school year with items related to the same three topics: Star Trek, a canto (a major section of a long narrative poem), and the British punk band The Clash.
“It sets the tone for people who are at that first session – they realize it’s not pedantic or esoteric,” he said.
In the past, for example, he has pointed out that The Clash song “London Calling” was used to promote the 2012 London Olympics. He has dissected the brilliance of “Darmok,” the second episode of the fifth season of “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” And he’s read an excerpt from the poet Derek Walcott’s celebrated work, “Omeros.”
During the pandemic, Toorawa began holding the dr. T. projecT on Instagram Live. Much to his surprise, some of his former attendees at Cornell started tuning in. So he’s kept up the broadcasts, and archives them at @drtproject.
He plans to continue with the project for as long as people keep showing up on Tuesdays for his short takes on saffron, Hong Kong film director Wong Kar-wai, sitar player Shujaat Khan, and whatever else strikes his fancy. At some point, he supposes, the project will have run its course. But for now, he’s still adding to his lengthy list of things worth knowing.
“It’s work,” he says, “but it doesn’t feel like a chore because people keep showing up and I am obviously myself always learning things, too.”