Staff Spotlight: Nadia Horning

For Assistant Professor of Political Science Nadia Horning, life has been anything but predictable. Horning hails from Madagascar, but she spent her early life traveling between Africa and France since her father was

Madagascar’s military attaché to the embassy in France. Although she spent much of her childhood in France and spoke French fluently, Horning was still shocked when, at 12 years old, her parents surprised her by enrolling her and her older sister in a boarding school in Paris.

Her parents made the decision to send their daughters away because there was, “nothing good” going on in Madagascar at the time.

“The dictatorship was in full steam, and the economy had collapsed,” Horning said. “People began to starve.”

Her parents, predicting that the quality of the children’s education might go down, found a Parisian boarding school open to daughters of recipients of the French equivalent of the Purple Heart. Luckily, Horning’s father had received this honor.

The experience would ultimately be the one that would help prompt Horning’s interest in political science.

“There was the pain of leaving my country and my family at age 12, looked for some justification,” Horning said. “I had to explain why I had to go through this experience and it led me to be curious about the context in which my parents found themselves forced to make the decision to send their children overseas. Now as a mother, I realize how difficult that must have been, and frankly I don’t know if I’d have the courage to do that.”

When visiting Madagascar on school vacations, Horning was consistently struck by the harsh realities of life in Madagascar under the dictatorship.

“It’s not just those who end up starving and suffering; pain comes in different forms,” Horning said. “Even if you’re among the privileged, you’re not spared.”

In many other ways, the polarization of Madagashi society hit Horning hard.

“What really drew me to political science was my observation of inequalities within Madagashi society,” Horning said. “It was the dominated versus dominators, rich versus the poor.”

But before she found her way to politics, she went to Cottey College in Missouri, a small liberal arts school to which she earned a scholarship the year after her graduation from high school in France. Horning relished the opportunity to study overseas because of her interest in language — she planned to attend a university, either one in Geneva or one in Paris, that was specifically set up to instruct potential translators and interpreters.

However, instead of just improving her language skills, the experience had a dramatic effect on the trajectory of Horning’s life.

Horning remembers arriving on campus and receiving confused looks after her first interaction with American students in which she inquired in British English as to where the “loo” was.

“Essentially what happened is I discovered America and Americans and very quickly realized that I didn’t understand them, so I became curious,” said Horning.

This interest, combined with the occurrence of student riots in France following her year at Cottey College made, “the situation in France very unattractive at the time,” and encouraged Horning to attend university in the United States.

She chose George Mason University in Washington, D.C., an ideal option because its location was at the nexus of American politics. She began studying political science, convinced by a recent technological innovation that her previous career idea path of translation would soon be rendered obsolete by the introduction of an automated translating system in Japan.

“I believed in it and I thought, ‘this might not be a good idea if machines are going to replace us,’” Horning said. “It was new and promising and also kind of threatening.”

Although the technology did not end up working, Horning continued on her newfound path of political science, which eventually led her to graduate school and to an international development firm in Burlington (“I come from a poor county so [development] was always a preoccupation.”), where she did consulting work on local governance capabilities and resource management in Madagascar.

“What I learned was that there were fascinating things going on in resource management, and state/society relations in Madagascar that I had become very curious about but didn’t have time to look into,” Horning said.

In order to spend more time researching resource management, Horning returned to school for a PhD. from Cornell. There, she both discovered a love for teaching — while other graduate students preferred research, “I was running to teaching,” Horning said — and was able to continue her research.

“I was intrigued as to why some farmers where complying with the legislation [about deforestation] and why some others were not,” Horning said. “Lo and behold, that became the topic of my dissertation.”

Horning continues to study resource management; although she hesitates to make the joke that she’s “branched out” in conservation research, she has expanded her research to Africa, “essentially to debunk the myth that Madagascar is ‘exceptional,’ that Madagascar is different, and really isn’t when it comes to the politics of resource management. Modern politics and economics are very similar across the ocean, and we are absolutely African.”

While the book she is currently working on focuses on conservation politics, Horning hopes to dive into work on the political history of Madagascar after she finishes work on this current book.

She continues to be interested in Madagascar because, “We can’t even seem to do the wrong thing right — our coups are not real coups, our referenda are not referenda … we just don’t seem to do anything according to texts.”

Although Horning said she, “never imagined I would do this — teaching was not on the radar,” and had expected to return to her consulting job after earning her PhD., she found that her background in Madagascar helped her in teaching her political science classes, especially the African Politics course she currently teaches at Middlebury.

“My knowledge doesn’t necessarily come from textbooks, but from real-world experiences,” Horning said. “It makes a big difference when you’re lecturing. I could be telling you guys so many stories, but I’m careful not to turn the course into ‘me, me, me, me, me.’ “

Horning says her greatest challenges at Middlebury lie in her ability to, “[keep] up with students’ interests and passions as I teach,” although, “it’s an exciting challenge, not a daunting one.

“Also, how to connect knowledge I think I need to impart on my students in ways that they find exciting and relevant and ways they can relate to, and the question becomes more challenging,” Horning said.

Though her current home of Ripton, Vt. is one of the smallest towns she has lived in, Horning has found that teaching at Middlebury still allows her the feeling of living in a cosmopolitan environment.

“The contrast between being a small town and being very international [is one of the best aspects of Middlebury],” Horning said. “I really appreciate the opportunity to be able to speak and hear different languages and know that there are people with different nationalities and different experiences. It’s very reassuring to me. Completely removes the, ‘Oh it’s a small rural town in Vermont.’”

And as far as Middlebury students go, Horning says: “I tap energy and I’m just sucking all that energy.” As she looked at me, a student in one of her classes, she said, “You give me a reason to get going.”