Professor Noam Dorr
Please join the WWU English community in welcoming Professor Noam Dorr and getting to know him through this series of icebreaker questions.
Where did you live/work before coming to Western?
I was an assistant professor at Texas Tech University in Lubbock for two years before coming to Western. I sometimes miss the prairie dogs that would pop up all over the place, but I’m thrilled to be in Bellingham now.
What is your area of specialty?
Technically creative nonfiction. My artistic home is the essay, but my departures from that home take on pretty wild forms—sometimes they look like film, sometimes a performance, a physical object, or a novel. Thematically I focus on the Middle East, where I’m from, but I also teach global literatures more broadly and many works in translation.
What do you like so far about being at Western?
The students are incredible here, just so full of curiosity and willingness to challenge themselves. I get the sense that they’re really committed to shaping their own education. And I’d also say: walking every day past the arboretum on one side and the ocean on the other definitely doesn’t hurt!
What stirs joy within you outside of your work?
The ridiculousness of my children. Cooking for others. Being near or in a body of water.
What is your secret “superpower”? Tell us something that others may not know about you.
One of my greatest guilty pleasures is the television show Chopped where chefs are tasked with making meals from random (and often incongruous!) ingredients. I’ve been told that I’m quite good at taking a set of disconnected ingredients and turning them into something other people wish they were eating. In some ways this is not unlike my creative work—often I find that the most interesting essays for me to write (and read) involve putting together disconnected subjects to see what happens when they speak to one another.
