Duke Student Commencement Speaker to Draw on International Life

“We have a responsibility to know how we affect other people’s lives,” says Duke senior.

Wednesday, May 3, 2006

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Durham, N.C. -- Before he arrived at Duke University, senior Yazan Kopty and his family moved from the U.S. to Jordan to Belgium and the United Arab Emirates. Along the way, he became fluent in English, Arabic and French. His citizenship is American and Belgium, but his heritage is mostly Christian Palestinian.

Kopty has spent his college years trying to understand international conflicts, particularly in the Middle East, through politics, literature and religion. On Sunday, May 14, Kopty will deliver Duke University’s student Commencement speech, drawing on the clashes and commonalities he has observed among cultures and countries.

“I think it’s important to recognize how we are all connected and that our own well-being is also dependent on the security and well-being of others,” Kopty said. “We have a responsibility to know how we affect other people’s lives and be sensitive to these dynamics.”

Duke’s Commencement ceremony begins at 10 a.m., May 14, at Wallace Wade Stadium. The Commencement address will be given by Duke’s John Hope Franklin, a leading figure in the field of African-American history and the James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of History.

Shatila camp

This photograph by senior Yazan Kopty shows a street in the Shatila Palestinian refugee settlement in Lebanon. Kopty has had his photos of refugees exhibited on campus.

The summer after his freshman year, Kopty volunteered at a center in Jordan serving mentally and physically handicapped people in a Palestinian refugee camp. The experience fueled his curiosity about the history and predicament of the people he met.

Back at Duke, he said he picked his major of international comparative studies because it gave him a comprehensive way to explore the social and political forces acting on the refugees he served, as well as to study other complicated global issues.

“It’s an interdisciplinary major,” he said. “You pick a region of the world to focus on, mine was the Middle East, and you work at it from different angles -- politics, culture, economics, religion and so on.”

 By his junior year, he had formulated a research project on the identity of Palestinian refugees. With grants from the deans of Trinity College, international comparative studies and the Center for International Studies and direction from his adviser, professor Miriam Cooke, Kopty spent that summer interviewing Palestinian refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Israel and the West Bank.

“I found that all these issues surrounding the refugees, from the most material to the most abstract, come together in the defining moment of Palestinian identity -- the loss of Palestine and its potential,” he said, summing up his senior honors thesis, “The Specter Nation: Palestinian Refugees, Nationalism, and the Right of Return.”

“They lost their ticket to the modern era after European colonialism and have been trying to put together those pieces ever since. In a sense, Palestinian identity is about reclaiming and putting together lost and disparate fragments.”

After graduating, Kopty will be a Hart Fellow with the Sanford Institute of Public Policy. He will be placed with a non-governmental organization in a soon-to-be-determined country that is facing complex social, political and humanitarian problems.

Kopty has been active in many aspects of campus life. He served on the Nasher Museum Student Advisory Board and the 2006 Commencement Committee. He was an active member of Dukes and Duchesses, student ambassadors who escort distinguished campus visitors, and as a leader in the International Association co-chaired the group’s 2004 and 2005 Springternational festivals.

One other Duke activity gave Kopty a chance to explore his place in the world. While participating in a summer study abroad program in Mediterranean countries, he came across a kindred spirit -- from 500 years ago.

The trip followed the 16th century travels of Leo Africanus, a diplomat and writer born in Spain whose life reads like an adventure novel with a trip to Timbuktu, capture by pirates and an audience with Pope Leo X.

As Kopty traveled with fellow students to Spain, Morocco, Egypt and Italy and read a fictional account of Africanus, he said he began to identify with the Renaissance man’s movement among countries, cultures and religions.

“He’s a figure who was shaped by forces external to him but at the same time was completely engaged in each of those complications and affected them in his own way,” he said. “That’s definitely how I’ve seen my life.”