Dear Alumni and Friends of the Department of History,
It's my honor to be serving as the Interim Chair of our Department for the Fall 2024 semester: the energy and dedication of our students and faculty make it an assignment I relish every time I walk into our quarters in McMahon. And this comes at a time of transition for us. We thank Michael Kimmage, who chaired us for six years and in particular steered us through all the challenges of the COVID era (and is now off on a well-earned leave in Berlin to continue his research and writing). And we look forward to the leadership of Laura Mayhall, who will return from sabbatical in January 2025 to lead us in the years to come.
In recent years your support has become increasingly crucial in making it possible to serve our students well. We draw upon DC-area alumni to serve as panelists for our annual History Major Career Night, an invaluable link between yourselves and our current students. Your financial support makes it possible for us to host events, including some high-profile public-facing ones that have drawn widely from beyond campus and raised our visibility; to support student activities and research (including the History Club, featured in one of our articles in this issue); and generally to help nurture excellence and community within the Department. Have a look at just a few of the occasions you have made possible:
Photo: clockwise from upper left: Author Rachel Swarns talks about her book, The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church; Catholic University History professor Michael Kimmage talks about his book, Collisions: The Origins of the War in Ukraine and the New Global Instability; celebration for senior thesis writers; alumni and current students at the annual History Major Careers Night
Two initiatives are at the top of our agenda as I write this. One stems from an overall year-long review process, by which the School of Arts and Sciences has tasked every department and program under its auspices to take a good, hard look at its undergraduate programs, and ask: are we accomplishing what we want to accomplish, what are other comparable programs doing that we should take notice of, what do the data tell us about our strengths and weaknesses, and what do we need to do to address all those points? For the first time in recent memory the Department will hold an all-day retreat in January to talk through our next directions. We've already decided to pioneer a new gateway course for our freshman majors, "Explorations in History", to lay the groundwork for our students to master the skillsets necessary to study history at college level. We believe the strengths of our B.A. -- developing analytical reading and writing, organizing information, and conveying it clearly -- will remain our foundational mission, but we're likely to do some tweaking as to how we get there. (Don't worry, alumni: Junior Seminar and Senior Thesis will remain our bedrocks!)
The other is a reorganization of Arts and Sciences, with the aim of making creative collaboration between academic disciplines easier. This is a work in progress: as of now it looks as if History will be more closely paired with Anthropology as we've seen converging interests in areas like cultural heritage (of interest to our students who may aspire to museum or public history careers) and archeology with material culture as an emerging focus in history, We welcome this and look forward to reporting on how it evolved.
The state of the Department is strong, and we pledge to keep you informed as we move forward. Again, our thanks for your support and our best best wishes to you. I especially invite any of you who may be passing through Washington, or just would like to reconnect, to contact us: we'd love to hear from you and hear about what you've been doing!
Larry Poos