Dr. Nada Khalifa

What will my child walk away with?  The habit of reading critically and attentively rather than passively. My students leave able to notice the assumptions and context embedded in a text, not just its plot or main idea.

What can families expect?  Rigorous, globally informed instruction from a trained historian who brings genuine context to every text we read, drawing on years of research into movements and ideas that shaped the modern world.

What does class actually feel like?  Discussion-driven and inquisitive. We treat every text as something worth investigating carefully, the way a historian would approach a primary source.

How do you challenge a curious mind?  I ask students to question the narratives embedded in what they read, much as I do with historical sources in my own research, so curious minds learn to look past the surface of a story.

Credentials and Experience  I earned my BA in English from the University of Toronto and my PhD in History from Columbia University, where my research on self-determination movements in the modern Middle East was funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council and the Sakıp Sabancı Center for Turkish Studies. I taught the Contemporary Civilization core curriculum at Columbia and later taught Islamic and British imperial history at the University of Toronto, Scarborough.