Linda Pappas Funsch is a career educator and specialist in modern Middle Eastern history, current affairs, and Islamic studies. She has studied, worked, and traveled extensively throughout the region.
Author of Oman Reborn: Balancing Tradition and Modernization (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and numerous articles, she is a frequent guest at scholarly symposia across the United States. As an adjunct professor, she has taught at several colleges and universities including, currently, at Frederick Community College’s (FCC) Institute for Learning in Development, where she established a program in Middle East Studies. Her courses at FCC include historical surveys of the region, cultural analyses, current events, art and architecture, and gender studies. In addition, Professor Funsch frequently serves a mentor to graduate students at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Studies (Washington, DC) as they prepare theses relating to the history, culture, and foreign policy of the Sultanate of Oman.
Following undergraduate study in New York and Cairo, Ms. Funsch completed an MA in Near Eastern Languages and Literature at New York University. She served with the League of Arab States’ permanent mission to the United Nations as editor of The Arab World magazine. Following her tenure with The Ford Foundation in New York and Beirut, she served as US director of the American Research Center in Egypt, a consortium of North American universities and museums.
Linda Funsch has led small group cultural immersion study visits to many countries of the Middle East, including Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, and Oman; participants have included members of the US military, educators, students, and laymen. A recognized authority on Oman, Ms. Funsch has visited the sultanate more than two dozen times, as scholar/escort, as an independent researcher, and as a guest of both the Ministry of Information and the Adviser to His Majesty the Sultan for Cultural Affairs. She is currently completing a full-length manuscript on the role of women in national development in Oman, a case study representing the culmination of decades of research on gender relations in the Middle East.
Photo by Linda Pappas Funsch