Paul Draghi

Paul Draghi has been with Norwich University since January 2015 as Environmental Curriculum Director, and am particularly interested in the area of Defense Sustainability, which is the point at which National Defense and Security concerns intersect with Environmental Studies. He is very proud to have developed, and continue to teach, an online course in the Bachelor's Degree Program in Strategic Studies and Defense Analysis titled SCIE310: The Scientific Basis of Sustainability.

Previously, Paul worked as Director of Digital Outreach and Lecturer in Forest History at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, and my career at that School also involved establishing and directing their Information Technology for 17 years. His introduction to Yale began in 1994 when he returned to the academic world from IT and management consulting to catalog Yale's Tibetan Collection at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and I joined the Forestry faculty in 19

Paul's educational background includes a BA in literature from the University of Connecticut at Storrs, where he spent two years in AFROTC and joined Arnold Air Society, after which he attended Indiana University in Bloomington and studied Comparative Literature and Language and Area Studies, with an emphasis on Inner Asia. Paul learned Tibetan, Mongolian, and Sanskrit, and expanded his skills in French and German. He chose IU to work with the Dalai Lama's elder brother, Thubten Jigme Norbu, and later studied with Dr. Helmut Hoffmann, an eminent German Tibetologist, with whom he completed his doctorate. When Paul received his Ph.D. in 1980, he began teaching at Indiana and also became assistant director of the Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies, setting a pattern that would dominate his career whereby he nearly always followed paths that combined administration and teaching.

His dissertation centered on the hunter as a literary character in Tibetan, Bhutanese and Medieval European sources, reflecting the interest in the cross-cultural study of how various traditions depict nature generally, and hunting in particular, in art, literature and folklore. While Paul's later research interests focused more specifically on traditions and practices relating to forestry and hunting in German-speaking Europe, his teaching has sought to illustrate that every nation's literature, art and popular culture illustrate that nation's values and cultural concerns about the natural world and how humans relate to nature.

Paul's administrative work at IU led to training and management opportunities in the growing world of Information Technology, and his Area Studies specialization in Inner Asia combined with an interest in national security when he had the opportunity to develop a seminar to examine the cultural and social impacts of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the early 1980's. The insights gained and people met, both from Afghanistan and our own government, coalesced into another important dimension of Paul's career, and continue to find resonance in his ambition to combine Area Studies, Information Technology, Ecology and Environmental Studies, and National Security. His consulting work included developing online training materials for clients that included IBM, the Nasdaq Stock Market, and several financial and government institutions and agencies.