User Profile

That's how you came here, like a star
without a name. Move across the night sky
with those anonymous lights.
-Jellaludin Rumi

[Tamu is a RPG character in the vorkosiverse based on Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan series. Her player is elorie. The icon photo is of Natacha Atlas; Tamu is not quite so glamorous, as she is an academic not a musician, but she does have that same look in her eye.]


Al salaam a'alaykum, my name is Tamu al-Faisir. I am a Terran, though I spent time on Lairouba as a child because my father, also a historian, held a teaching position there. I hold not one but two doctorates from Oxford, one in History and the other in Cultural Anthropology...My father says I am obsessive, but he says it with a proud smile. My interests are in culture change over time and in art as an expression of cultural tensions, especially as related to gender roles; my dissertation for my History degree was on the evolution of the women's dances of Asia Minor and north Africa as a world cultural phenomenon in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, and my Cultural Anthropology dissertation was on the "back to the tents" movement of the descendents of the Bedouin. I have taught for two years as an adjunct professor at the Imperial University on Eta Ceta IV, and have now accepted a position at Vorbarr Sultana University on Barrayar, teaching Terran and galactic history...My friends all think I'm crazy for taking a post on a barbaric backwater on the other side of the Nexus, but I am very excited at the prospect of being right in the middle of a culture in the midst of so much change!

I am a dancer as well as an academic. My grandmother is a member of the Mevlevi Order of the Tasawwuf, or Sufis, and I follow her teachings as best I can. I do field research, and the rest of the time I'm in a classroom or a library. My father says I'm insatiably curious, like a cat. "Scheherazade" is his pet name for me; I was almost named that, but my mother intervened :)

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