Bio: Camron Michael Amin
Camron Michael Amin (Ph.D, U of Chicago, 1996) is an associate
professor of history at The University of Michigan-Dearborn. He is the
author of The Making of the Modern Woman: Gender, State Policy and Popular
Culture, 1865-1946 (2002) and a co-editor of The Modern Middle East: A
Sourcebook (2005). His current research projects include studies of higher
education, journalism and globalization in Iran. And he really needs more
sleep than he gets.
Abstract
Faculty Housing at Isfahan Techonological University in 1978: Blurring
Private and Professional Lives by Design
Faculty housing at ITU was designed as integral part of an effort to create
a separate and self-contained university community, near but outside of
Isfahan. It was to have its own commissary, recreations facilities and
schools so as to make leaving campus a luxury rather than a necessity.
Private faculty lives were to be lived close to the intellectual and social
mission of the univeristy. Designed in the early 1970's as a branch of
Tehran's Aryamehr Technological University, it came into existence as the
Pahlavi regime that created it began to crumble in 1978. The ideal of a
harmonious community of scholars, teachers and students gave way to a much
more stressed and fractious community in which political and personaltiy
conflicts mixed with the academic and administrative routines of a
university that was still under construction culturally and materially.
Because the community was designed to be insular, it served as something of
a pressure cooker as the line between work and home --blurred by design --
faded altogether. Design of the campus, from its beginnings in the Ministry
of Science and Higher Education, will be explored through interviews with
the architect and the first two chancellors of ITU. A picture of daily life
at ITU in 1978 will be drawn from interviews with former residents.