When the first plane struck on Sept. 11, 2001, Engseng Ho was reading over correspondence between British colonial officials who were exchanging observations about Arabs in different part of the Empire. Then professor of anthropology and social studies at Harvard, Ho studied transnational Islamic exchanges and had written his doctoral dissertation about the migrations of the same Yemeni community that Osama bin Laden came from.
"The train of my thoughts jumped from the British Empire to the U.S. as a world power engaging with Arabs on an international scale," he said, recalling the moment his research took off in a new direction focusing on the interaction between the United States and its Arab and Islamic counterparts.
Looking at the relationships between different cultures across the globe is Ho's specialty. He joined the Duke faculty as professor of anthropology and of history at Duke this year, bridging two disciplines that are critically important to him.
"Globalization is not new," he said, suggesting that the history of international exchanges can offer lessons and concepts to inform our understanding of today's world. Also affiliated with the Duke Islamic Studies Center (DISC), Ho is teaching courses in history and cultural anthropology this year and is developing an anthropology history program at Duke.
Originally from Malaysia, a Muslim-majority country, Ho delved into interdisciplinary scholarship when he went in search of a more comprehensive narrative of Muslim societies to better understand his own.
"I thought if I studied other Muslim countries, I might someday be able to teach about the different ways in which societies could be Muslim," he said.
After graduating from Stanford with undergraduate degrees in economics and anthropology, Ho spent a few years as an international economist in Singapore before pursuing a masters and PhD at the University of Chicago.
There he shuttled between different parts of campus to meet with multiple mentors in anthropology, Arabic and Islamic studies. His dissertation on a society of Yemeni people that had a 500-year history of migration broke the mold of a traditional anthropology program.
"Typically anthropologists study contemporary society in one place geographically," Ho said. "This was different. Instead of it being localized and present, it was over time and spread out."
Ho spent two years in Yemen conducting research that revealed a rich history of a people who traveled throughout East Africa, the Arab world, India and Southeast Asia, intermarrying and contributing to the establishment of new Muslim religious, political and legal institutions. The dissertation grew into a book: The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean, published by the University of California Press in 2006.
Since moving from Cambridge to his new home in North Carolina with his wife, Duke plant evolutionary biology professor Kathleen Donohue, Ho continues to look for historical examples of transnational exchange.
Pointing to the Civil War practice of smuggling cotton from nearby Wilmington through Bermuda to England in exchange for weapons to fight the Union, Ho said this local example indicates that globalization is not a new phenomenon, but has been part of American history for some time.
Like Ho, Donohue also studies the transnational travels, albeit of plants like the cakile or "searocket," which found its way from the shores of Arabia through the Mediterranean, eventually landing on the dunes of North Carolina.
Ho said that in a sense, moving to Durham means connecting his interests with Duke's interests globally. He traveled to Singapore for the dedication of the Duke-NUS Medical School and Saudi Arabia for the Jeddah Economic Forum with faculty from DISC, and points to endeavors like the global expansion of Duke's Fuqua School of Business as examples.
"It's clear being in those places that Duke's international engagement is a very serious thing," he said, noting that global centers of gravity are shifting to the East.
"Duke is more poised to participate in shifting geographies and the leadership is focused on that," he said. "It's something smarter than ‘global,' -- it's aligning strategy to shifting axes around the world."