Past Connections

As the daughter of two St. Paul’s School educators, Bronwen King Callahan ’08 had a childhood that immersed her in campus life and the many worlds it encompassed. She was a frequent drop-in on the art classes led by her father, Colin Callahan, and soaked up the French and Italian that her mother, Toni Callahan ’76, a longtime language teacher, passed on to her. She mingled with her parents’ faculty friends, had free rein of the library, and often “imposed” herself on the students living in Conover 20, where her family resided.

 

But more than just lovely memories, Callahan says those experiences helped define her, instilling both a strong sense of self and a deepened curiosity for cultures and histories beyond those she first became aware of in Concord.

 

“I came to understand the importance of education and the importance of having and building a supportive community,” she says. “And the amount of diversity I was exposed to at St Paul's is definitely not something I would have seen growing up almost anywhere else in New Hampshire.”

 

These things have served her well as she’s pushed herself in her own education and as an educator in places far from home. Callahan’s fervent belief in the power of education has brought her to live and teach in far-flung locations that include the countries of Jordan and Georgia. And her commitment to bringing alive the stories of the past, she says, has the power to help students make sense of the present.

 

“There’s a lot of misunderstanding between different cultures and different people, and as educators we have this opportunity in education to promote understanding,” says the 31-year-old Callahan, who currently teaches history at the Commonwealth School, a small, private high school in Boston.

 

Callahan’s own story after St. Paul’s began at New York University, where plans for an art history degree were scrapped after she enrolled in an Arabic course. Here was a language and a culture unlike anything she’d ever studied and her passion for the Middle East soon shaped her college education. She studied abroad in Beirut and in 2012 graduated with a degree in Middle Eastern and gender studies, with a minor in Arabic. Two years later she signed on as a Peace Corps volunteer to teach English in Jordan.

 

The experience was both enriching and heartbreaking. Just five months into her stint, the growing presence of ISIS in Jordan forced the Peace Corp to pull its volunteers out of the country.

 

“I formed incredible ties with my host family and I was speaking with Arabic every day,” says Callahan. “I’d made promises to my host siblings that they were going to learn from me and go to good schools and to then to just be taken away like that, to have to tell them that the United States doesn’t think I’m safe in their country anymore, was very hard.”

 

Callahan eventually served out her Peace Corps time in the country of Georgia, then returned to the U.S. to earn a Master of Theological Studies from the Harvard Divinity School. “I knew I wanted to teach history and I saw this need to understand religion in order to do that,” she says. Armed with her M.T.S., Callahan returned to Jordan in 2018 for a two-year teaching stint at King’s Academy in Madaba.

 

Now, in a world of deepening divisions, both domestically and internationally, Callahan feels the call to teach in her home country. By giving a new generation of students the kinds of cross-cultural experiences she was exposed to, she believes they’ll be able to cut through stereotypes and see the world through a lens of art, history, and language.

 

“Too often we give students these names and dates and tell them, well, that’s history,” says Callahan. “But really it’s a story, and it’s a lot more interesting. And when you approach it that way you can help students understand different people and different cultures. And that encourages curiosity.”

 

Just like it did for Callahan.