In 2005, amidst calls for more globalization on US campuses, faculty and administration at UNC began imagining how to expand and deepen our school’s intellectual partnerships abroad. Our own History Department, unsurprisingly, has been at the fore of such initiatives, working with international partners to develop connections overseas to enrich the experience of students, graduates, and faculty at UNC.
Participants not pictured: Nicole Harry.
The first official exchange began in 2007 when Christopher Browning and Chad Bryant traveled to London with Dr. Lloyd Kramer to present their work at a joint colloquium entitled “The Nazi Occupation and its aftermath in Central Europe.” Since then, the partnership between history departments at Kings and UNC has been one of creative exchange, long-lasting friendships, and intellectual inspiration. Entire book projects have been borne of the encounters, such as the global endeavor of Borderlands in World History, 1700-1914 edited by Kings’ Paul Readman and our own Cynthia Radding and Chad Bryant (Springer, 2014). Other written collaborations include Walking Histories, 1800-1914, co-edited by Chad Bryant, Paul Readman and Arthur Burns (Palgrave, 2016) and War, Demobilization and Memory: The Legacy of War in the Era of Atlantic Revolutions co-edited by Alan Forrest, Karen Hagemann, and Michael Rowe (Springer, 2016).
Joint teaching opportunities have also featured as a highlight of the exchange. In 2015, Dr. Sarah Shields inaugurated faculty teaching exchanges between our departments. Dr. Jim Bjork of Kings served as her counterpart making the trip from London to North Carolina. Shields’ class on the Israel-Palestine conflict instantly drew unprecedented enrollment at Kings and was deemed a major success in piloting faculty exchange centered on teaching. A few years later, Chad Bryant and Uta Balbier hosted the first joint UNC-Kings COIL class (Collaborative Online International Learning), which brought the partnership into the digital age by featuring conjoined, virtual classrooms which enabled educational interaction between students and faculty across the Atlantic.
Graduate student exchanges have offered another critical pillar of the partnership . Sometimes, this has taken place in the form of student-forward projects, such as when Oskar Czenzde and Till Knobloch invited graduates at Kings to join their online virtual European History Seminar in 2020. The pair later developed this collaboration into an on-the-ground exchange when they obtained funding to send UNC Graduate Student Kylie Broderick to present her research in London in 2022.
In addition to the successes of book projects, faculty exchange, and such student-led initiatives, the running, “flagship” program of our departments’ ongoing collaboration is certainly the UNC-Kings College London Workshop on Transatlantic Historical Approaches. This workshop, now in its 13th year, is a graduate student organized event which offers participants a chance to present their research in the Spring in London and then in the Fall at UNC. Each year, the history departments at our respective universities bring together two graduate organizers to select among a competitive pool of participants, who then get the chance to develop their research, meet new faculty at our partner institution, visit relevant archives in host cities, and receive constructive feedback on their work all while visiting the historic streets of London or the busy quads of Chapel Hill. The collaboration has led to multiple graduate publications, constructive feedback on dissertation work, and ongoing friendships, according to participants.
The workshop has surely seen its shares of difficulties, such as in 2020, when graduate organizer Daniel Velasquez oversaw the exchange’s navigation of the Covid-19 pandemic. The successful online workshop that year ensured that the History Department kept its title as the longest-running exchange between the two universities, and longer than any other department at UNC-Chapel Hill, by temporarily transitioning the workshop to an online modality.
Most importantly, this ongoing graduate exchange has fostered durable intellectual collaboration between our departments over the course of thirteen years. As Kramer recalls of the initial project vision, he believed “the most productive thing we [felt we] could do was to bring grad students into the equation.” Graduate student participants from past years have agreed wholeheartedly. Nicole Harry, participant in 2022, highlighted the interpersonal advantages of the experience, stating “I loved the UNC-KCL workshop, especially the people I met as part of the experience.” She hopes to build on her links with the KCL community by planning other UNC-KCL related events in the future, such as a dissertation writing workshop for advanced doctoral students at Kings and UNC.
In 2022, Kylie Broderick will pilot the workshop into its 13th year, and hopes to continue to build the workshop and our relationship with KCL to new heights. The Call for Papers for this year’s UNC-KCL workshop was just released, and the workshop looks forward to an exciting new year of projects under the theme of “(Dis)Unity.”
-Donald Santacaterina