Gaining New Perspectives

As you may recall (or not), the week before last we had our first overseas visitors. Actually, Ali’s nephew, Armaz, and his lovely wife Angelique, didn’t come to Auckland just to see us. Armaz had been invited to make a couple presentations at Massey University, and the result was a job offer. Seems like the opportunity to move from post-doc life to a permanent position with light teaching duties and strong research support (read: available funding) is pretty attractive, especially since there may be good opportunities for Angelique as well. Doesn’t hurt that they found Middle Earth strongly reminiscent of Old Europe (not to mention rural northern Iran), so that even though it’s farther from home, they might suffer less homesickness than in San Diego. And it was great to have them here; we rented a car for the week and had a blast showing them around our new hometown and seeing it through new eyes.

But, fun as it was to have company, as soon as they left I had to hit the books. Last week was the beginning of the spring semester at U of A, and I had homework to do. Lots of homework. My first class, Imperialism and International Law, is what’s called an “intensive.” More like a bloody endurance test: the entire semester is crammed into 5 days. Plus I got my teaching assignment – I’m tutoring Commercial Law 101, which involves meeting with groups of about 15 students to go through problems/questions based on what they were supposed to learn from their regular lectures. Fortunately, my tutoring sessions – 3 per week – are all on Thursday, and don’t begin until next week.

In the meantime, the class I’m taking is really wonderful, totally absorbing, with a great professor (Tony Anghie, visiting from U of Utah) and a really good group of students. There are only ten of us, with backgrounds including international relations, politics, arms control, aid/development, and refugee issues; there’s even another former commercial lawyer who’s just taking the class because it sounded so darn interesting. It’s both an introduction to international law and a look at inat’l law’s history with an eye towards colonized/Third World perspectives.

But it’s getting late, and I’ve still got more reading to do, so ta-ta for now.

Cheers,
Sandie