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Some Building-Blocks of Our Community Our
department nurtures many interlocking intellectual communities, both
within and across disciplines. We sponsor a plethora of extracurricular
thematic reading groups, which provide a unique opportunity for
graduate students and faculty to engage in discussion of the most
recent and exciting scholarship in history, and in related fields. A
monthly colloquium brings historians from outside the campus to our
department, thus widening the scope of our community. And each
semester, a faculty-led workshop provides dissertating students with
the opportunity to receive feedback on their ongoing projects.
Similarly, students writing dissertation proposals have been
increasingly successful in obtaining funding for research, thanks to a
proposal writing workshop coordinated by a faculty member. Both
seminars have the added benefit of fostering collaboration among
students, and of facilitating the interaction of students with faculty
members in other fields.
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The Fundamental Importance of Student Collegiality Graduate
students work together to provide mutual academic and social support,
particularly in the first years of the program. Their efforts
supplement and extend the faculty-run orientation for new students and
the orientation for new teachers, in significant ways. For example,
each incoming student is paired up with a more advanced graduate
student as part of a mentoring program designed to ease the transition
to life in graduate school, the department, and the towns of Champaign
and Urbana. Our History Graduate Student Association affords students a
voice in departmental policy and a social outlet through gatherings and
sporting activities. Students are particularly proud of their efforts
in creating an intellectual community that supports the investigation
of women's and gender history, and these have led to the institution of
a tremendously successful annual symposium, now in its sixth year. The
internationally-recognized Journal of Women's History has recently migrated to the University of Illinois, and graduate students play an important role in its production.
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Student Representation Not
only do graduate students interact with faculty in the day-to-day
academic life of the department and in extracurricular activities, but
they are directly involved in vital decision-making processes. Graduate
students are represented on nearly all departmental committees and on
all search committees, and there are always student delegates present
at faculty meetings.
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New Curricular Opportunities As
a result of our department's participation in the Carnegie Initiative,
we have recently instituted a new first-year sequence designed to
provide students with a common academic experience, a shared sense of
intellectual endeavor, and similar set of skills, methods, and
objectives. Because it is so new, we don't know how it will work; in
particular, we don't know if we can succeed in addressing the needs and
interests of students whose areas of research are often very distant
from one another, in space and in time. But we are all excited about
the possibilities for increased interaction and collaboration among
students, and between students and the faculty who will be coordinating
and team-teaching these courses.
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Enriching Our Community and Those of Our Disciplinary Neighbors Graduate
students and faculty in our department are key players in the creation
of thriving intellectual communities that embrace other disciplines,
methodologies, and research agendas. A number of the area studies
programs and centers for research that flourish at the University of
Illinois are directed or staffed by historians, and these provide
second intellectual homes for the many Ph.D candidates whose projects
require, or invite, interdisciplinary contact. In addition to the
programs described below, our department and our students are closely
affiliated with the East Asian and Pacific Studies Center, the Russian
and East European Studies Center, the Program in Medieval Studies,
Native American House, the Gender and Women's Studies Program, the Unit
for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, the Latina-Latino Studies
Program, the Asian-American Studies Program, the Program in Arms
Control, Disarmament and International Security (ACDIS), and the
Program in Science, Technology, Information and Medicine (STIM).
African American Studies and Research Program
Directed by faculty member Sundiata Cha-Jua, this program had its
genesis over a generation ago in a series of student protests, and is
still one of the most vibrant intellectual communities affiliated with
the History Department.
Program in South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
This
program, directed by historian Kenneth Cuno, supports an array of
opportunities for students working in these areas of the world. It
sponsors its own weekly lecture series, oversees linguistic
instruction, offers prizes for student work, and coordinates study
abroad initiatives.
Center for Latin America and Caribbean Studies
Directed by historian Nils Jacobsen, the Center is an expression of the
University's longstanding commitment to the study of Latin America,
which began as early as 1904, when the School of Agriculture sent a
delegation to São Paulo, Brazil. In 1909 the Department of History
began offering courses on Latin America, and the Spanish Department
followed in 1928. The Library began collecting materials from the
region before World War I, and now houses one of the finest collections
in the world.
Center for African Studies
Established
in 1970, the Center for African Studies at the University of Illinois
is one of the leading African studies programs in the United States.
Under the leadership of historian Jean Allman, it is committed to
providing comprehensive and excellent educational opportunities for
graduate students, including a wide range of course offerings and
regular instruction in six African languages, which augment the
resources of the History Department.
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The Department Family (A Reflection by Carol Symes, Assistant Professor of History) When
I was in graduate school, anyone so unwise as to have a spouse or
children was tacitly encouraged to disguise or downplay this unhappy
fact of nature; it was regarded, by many members of the faculty at that
institution, as an indicator of weak-mindedness, betraying a lack of
serious commitment to scholarship. It came as a very pleasant surprise,
then, to find that an entirely different atmosphere -- and attitude --
prevailed in the Department of History at the U of I. Demographics, in
part, explain this: ours is a young faculty. There are senior scholars
in our department (full professors, occupants of chairs) who are also
the parents of infants and toddlers; others, of course, have school-age
children, teenagers, or adult progeny. But demography alone cannot
account for the cheerful, organic way in which the spouses, partners,
and children of graduate students are also welcomed and integrated into
the department; to me, carrying my old baggage, it is remarkable. And I
am certainly not the first to find that intellectual community can be
more readily sustained when the life of the mind is not considered
separate from the well-being of the individual: mens sana in corpore sano implies a sound scholar embraced by a thriving family, as well as a well-trained mind in a healthy body.
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Contact Information Antoinette Burton, Professor and Chair, aburton@uiuc.edu Kathryn Oberdeck, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, kjo@uiuc.edu Carol Symes, Assistant Professor and Graduate Teaching Assistant Coordinator, symes@uiuc.edu
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The Community-Building Initiatives of Our Students Many
of the most powerful fora for intellectual exchange that exist in our
department are the products of graduate student initiative. The
Graduate Symposium on Women's and Gender History (see below) is the
most prominent example, but students also find opportunities for
collective engagement in the History Graduate Student Association
(HGSA), an affiliate of the American Historical Association; the
International Students' Caucus and the Women's Caucus; and a chapter of
Phi Alpha Theta, a national professional society. We are also proud of
the leadership shown by our students in the recent successes of the
Graduate Employees' Organization, a union whose efforts on behalf of
teaching- and research assistants has enriched the intellectual lives
of all students by helping to ensure that they can pursue their degrees
in a supportive academic environment which is also a supportive
workplace.
Graduate Symposium on Women's and Gender History
The Graduate Symposium on Women's and Gender History was inaugurated in
2000, as the capstone event of the History Department's Women's History
Month celebration. It has since expanded to include contributions from
graduate students drawn from programs throughout the United States and
Canada, and from programs such as American Studies, Anthropology, Art
History, Classics, Comparative Literature, English, History,
Communications, Library and Information Science, Sociology, and Women's
Studies. The Symposium has also strengthened its original mission by
encouraging the historical analysis of gender in its myriad
intersections with questions of race, class, ethnicity, and sexuality.
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Extending the Boundaries of Our Campus Community In
many ways, the initiatives of our graduate students have inspired
faculty to create a larger intellectual community for historians at the
University of Illinois. This year, we will be hosting the annual
meeting of the Society for French Historical Studies. Last year, our
department became home to The Journal of Women's History, which
involves graduate students in a number of key professional activities
-- as has long been the case for students who work on the staff of The Slavic Review, another scholarly publication based at the University of Illinois.
French Historical Studies
In 2006, the University of Illinois will host the 52nd annual meeting
of the Society for French Historical Studies, thereby bringing hundreds
of historians to the campus and adding an international dimension to
our department's intellectual community.
The Journal of Women's History
In the
summer of 2004, this prestigious journal found a new home in the
History Department. Edited by faculty members Jean Allman and
Antoinette Burton, it also provides important editorial opportunities
for graduate students.
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Creating a Community of Teachers: A Challenge A
major topic of discussion in our community this year revolves around
questions of undergraduate teaching, an endeavor shared by faculty and
nearly all graduate students in our department. We would all like to
see more -- and more meaningful -- teaching opportunities emerge for
our students, most of whom work as teaching assistants or graders, but
many of whom would like to be able to design and teach their own
courses. The difficulty, of course, is balancing the demands of
research with those of teaching. So, as we work to provide excellent
graduate student teachers with more outlets for their creative and
scholarly energies, we are also working to develop a series of
workshops and practices that can train students to take on these
responsibilities -- thus making them an organic part of their academic
lives, and not a hindrance to their writing and research.
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