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  “The department really nurtured me as an assistant professor. It enabled me to get off to a good start.”

  Sasha Pack

  Associate Professor of History

By JIM BISCO

Published: September 1, 2011

Sasha Pack is exploring the making of the modern Strait of Gibraltar—what he refers to as “Europe’s Deepest Border”—as a recipient of the Humanities Institute’s 2011-12 Faculty Fellowship.

“The history is very rich there,” says the associate professor of history in the College of Arts and Sciences. “The strait is a border between Europe and Africa, the Mediterranean and Atlantic, Spain and Morocco, and the Christian and Muslim worlds. It’s a border in lots of ways, but when you actually get right down to it, you see just how much exchange there is across the border, how there are millions of people in that region who you can’t call of European descent or of African descent. They’re both because there’s so much mixing,” Pack explains.

“Same with religion—you see the influence of Islam and Christianity. Even the language people speak is peppered with words from Arabic, Spanish, French, English and Berber, which is a regional tribe that was there before the Arab conquests of the early middle ages,” he says. “It’s a kaleidoscope that people don’t really know about and historians haven’t really paid much attention to.”

Pack’s perspective of the border begins 150 years ago, a time of progress in the region that was emblematic of global changes, including the introduction of rail and steamships, a push by European powers to create agricultural settlements in North Africa and the onslaught of the new disease cholera. “All these things came together in the 1860s that I think really changed the dynamic and turned it into something that had up till that point been pretty much a real border. There was almost no crossing before that except for the occasional raid. People in Spain were afraid of those raids and people who lived in Morocco were afraid of the Spanish, but after 1860 there was a lot more communication,” he observes.

Pack wants to use the Strait of Gibraltar to illustrate the impact of borders on the way a country is governed. “In a lot of ways that are hard to predict at first, the border dynamic will have an important effect on so many aspects of economic and foreign policy, and even cultural questions. I want to bring that into history more than we are used to thinking about,” he says.

His proposed book on this particular border will be the first such historical perspective as Pack becomes the area’s first historian. His first book, “Tourism and Dictatorship: Europe’s Peaceful Invasion of Franco’s Spain,” looked at how the politics of Spain changed with the building of the tourist industry. It won the Best First Book prize by the Society of Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies.

The Wisconsin native always had an interest in Europe. In college, he was studying chemistry but found he was attracted to history. His Cuban mother encouraged him to study abroad in Spain for a semester. He describes it as a magical experience.

Pack arrived at UB after earning his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin in 2004. “The department really nurtured me as an assistant professor,” he relates. “It enabled me to get off to a good start. They are great colleagues and I’ve become friends with many of them. The amount of intellectual influence they have had on me is tremendous.”

He specializes in teaching the history of modern Europe—the politics, transnational developments and culture and society. He served as faculty advisor for the Fulbright program in 2009-10, an association close to his heart. “It’s such a nice opportunity for UB students to have a chance to live and study in a foreign country. I had a scholarship in 2002 and it was really life-changing for me,” he says.

Pack resides in the Parkside area of Buffalo with his wife, Emilie, a French instructor at Canisius College and Niagara University. They live in what he describes as a “fixer-upper” built in 1900. “We love the house, but it does require some TLC,” he notes. “I feel like my life outside of here is housework.”

It’s not all work, though. Pack enjoys playing jazz and pop music on the piano. In fact, he gets together regularly in a combo with several members of the department, including associate professors Erik Seeman on guitar and Patrick McDevitt on bass. “Strictly for our pleasure, although an outside gig has been up for discussion,” he says. “I enjoy playing more than stripping varnish, which is what I have to do tonight.”