Ramona Teepe Lawrence, Ph.D.
Visiting Professor of History
My teaching invites students to consider themselves as participants in the research process. Engaging with primary sources provides a unique window into specific historical periods but also an opportunity to trace how the questions scholars asked shaped the reception of these sources. I aim to incorporate the new perspectives gained from primary materials in different languages into my teaching to present events and ideas from diverse points of view. Thus, the engagement with historical sources becomes a tool to cultivate empathy, and to see topics in other times and cultures as points of engagement for reflection on the present.
Biography
I received my Ph.D. from the department of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations at Yale University. My specialization is the Classical Near East, a field which focuses on the formation of various religious, intellectual and literary traditions that shaped the history of the Near East in the first millennium and beyond, crossing political and religious borders between the Byzantine and the Islamic worlds. Bridging disciplinary boundaries, I study primary materials that shed light on how religious communities defined themselves and reacted to linguistic change after the Arab conquest. At FSC, I leverage my language skills to teach World History courses from antiquity to premodern times.
Education
Yale University, New Haven, CT 2025
Ph.D., Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations
Freie Universität Berlin, Germany 2019
M.A. in Arabic Studies
Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität, Münster, Germany 2017
B.A. in Ancient Cultures of Egypt and the Near East and Arabic-Islamic Culture