Dear Friends, Alumni, and Fellow Historians,
Greetings from the UNC History Department! I am delighted to share with you some updates about the activities of our faculty, graduate students, alumni, and off-campus colleagues. For me, this is a bittersweet moment: I’m writing this on graduation day, at the end of my term as department chair, which began in 2018. Since then, we have all confronted multiple challenges—not least, the members of the class of 2023, whose undergraduate years were unexpectedly and dramatically altered. I congratulate the graduates, whose achievements and spirit are an inspiration; I commend my faculty colleagues, whose scholarship and teaching keep the lessons of history alive; and I appreciate our university administration and staff for maintaining this vital public institution.
For more news of the History Department, please do see our website, https://history.unc.edu/, which is ably maintained by graduate students and Digital History Lab coordinators, Madeleine McGrady and Sarah Miles.
It is no small feat to produce biannual editions of The Department Historian while engaged in teaching, scholarship, and extensive service; yet Prof. Eren Tasar (who is also the department’s Director of Graduate Studies) does so with aplomb. I sincerely thank him, as well as the graduate student contributors to this edition: Burak Bulkan, Oskar Czendze, Dani McIvor, and Mark Thomas-Patterson. More broadly, our Department Manager David Culclasure has organized our finances, staff, and much more for the past two years. We thank him heartily and wish him well as he moves on to a new position.
We remain deeply grateful for the generous backing of our friends and alumni. Private contributions enable us to fund research opportunities for undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty; participate in and coordinate national and international conferences; and maintain our connections to the general public. Crucially, they allow the our department to enhance the minimum stipend that UNC pays to graduate students, which makes our program more attractive to the best future historians, who in turn help to stimulate faculty research and enrich undergraduate education. Thank you, truly, for your continued interest and support.
I hope you will consider making a gift today to help us continue our tradition of excellence in History at UNC. And please stay in touch—we’d love to hear from you.
Sincerely,
 |