Born in Colombia and raised in Lebanon, Vice Provost Nadia El Cheikh grew up in a family of avid readers and with a strong sense of community. This was, in part, the result of the instability and precarity of an ongoing civil war in Lebanon. She comes from a rich background of literature, history and community, which have influenced her academic career and leadership experience.

With her late mother and brother. Photo courtesy of Vice Provost Nadia El Cheikh.

“My father loved Russian literature, in translation, so we read a lot of that; we had one common library. We read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky as teenagers, the classics, that is, and history, a lot of history,” explained El Cheikh, NYU Abu Dhabi’s Vice Provost for Cultural and Research Engagement. While she wouldn’t call it a fundamental academic choice, El Cheikh’s affinity for history as a discipline grew out of her likeness for the subject when she was growing up, in part the result of her exposure to literature and history in her childhood.

With her late father in Colombia. Photo courtesy of Vice Provost Nadia El Cheikh.

Although El Cheikh acknowledge that she struggles to speak about the experience of growing up with an ongoing civil war in Lebanon, she emphasized the impact it left on her and her community’s lives. “The deep denial, actually, that the war really changed us all, fundamentally, and it's hard to talk about it, of course. I remember very clearly that our lives changed,” she noted.

But she found an anchor in her family and her community during this tumultuous period. "When you are in a dangerous situation, communities become closer and tighter so we became very close with our neighbors… You become sort of bound to the neighborhood; you don't go very much beyond it,” she reminisced.

With her mother, brother and nephew. Photo Courtesy of Nadia El Cheikh.

El Cheikh went on to study history and archaeology at the American University of Beirut before moving on to Harvard as a PhD candidate — partly as a way to escape the war, she explained. Her move to Harvard didn’t come without challenges, though. “It was far, very far and communication was almost impossible. The airport would close often and the telecommunication with Lebanon was hard.”

But being at Harvard exposed her to a multitude of academics and vantage points to study the Arab world. “The place where you are studying somehow frames your questions and the kind of sensibility you have,” she explained. For El Cheikh, the array of courses and opportunities at Harvard led to her interest in Byzantine history, which became the focus of her work within the discipline. “I had the world opened up for me, because… there were professors teaching all kinds of things and all kinds of regions, periods. That was amazing.”

El Cheikh published two successful works, Women, Islam and Abbasid Identity and Byzantium Viewed by the Arabs and Crisis and Continuity at the Abbasid Court: Formal and Informal Politics in the Caliphate of al-Muqtadir, co-authoring the latter. After receiving her PhD in 1992, she returned to AUB as a professor and spent the majority of her life there as an academic, eventually becoming the first female dean in AUB’s 150-year history in 2016.

El Cheikh at her book signing in 205. Photo Courtesy of Nadia El Cheikh.

“I learned a lot… [It gave me] the opportunity to try to get to know these various disciplines [and] to work closer together to create synergies between them,” described El Cheikh of the interdisciplinary nature of her work as dean.

In the aftermath of the Lebanese financial crisis, she took up work beyond what was already on her plate to support her community. “We had a lot to grapple with, and it was sort of continuous and very intense and we couldn't follow up somehow the quickness with which the situation was just moving, I would say descending is actually the right word — we were just descending,” explained El Cheikh. As the Dean, El Cheikh connected the various systems and platforms to be better able to support students, staff and faculty during the pandemic.

El Cheikh brings this same spirit of connecting the dots and building synergies to her work as the Vice Chancellor for Culture and Research Engagement at NYU Abu Dhabi. As Vice Provost, El Cheikh is set to lead the NYUAD Institute, a public-facing center that brings together research, scholars and professionals in collaboration with the Arts Center and the Arts Gallery.

“I want to bring the region to Abu Dhabi… somehow I feel like the Arab region is a bit lost in translation. I want to do more, to bring in more Arabic to the programming. There's a lot of resources in the region; a lot of good artists and writers,” explained El Cheikh.

El Cheikh’s approach is predicated on an important question. “How does our presence also impact the region positively? I want to understand more how the presence here can actually benefit the region, culturally and intellectually,” she clarified.

And in that regard, she will be looking to expand the connotations attached to culture in the UAE. “There are lots of Lebanese, Syrians, Jordianians and Egyptians and Iraqis and, particularly because of, sort of, forced migrations… so to engage with them more so; this is how I’m trying to connect some dots,” she explained

As she looks forward to getting to know the institution and community better to identify key goals within programming, one of El Cheikh’s main constituencies of interest is students themselves. “I want to try to actively engage the students' societies, students representatives more to understand how we can actually get the students to do more of this. Because I don't know that, you know, they take advantage of… this amazing resource that NYUAD already provides: world-class reading performances, dance or music, performing and singing and the exhibits.”

El Cheikh with her husband in Vietnam. Photo Courtesy of Vice Provost Nadia El Cheikh.

As she continues building her vision for the Institute here at NYUAD, El Cheikh has also found belonging in Saadiyat’s landscape, its beaches and through swimming. One of her favorite places around Saadiyat is the Louvre, where you may catch her taking a walk occasionally, perhaps with a copy of The Swerve by Steven Greenblatt, a book she highly recommends.