During the fall semester 2019, it was business as usual in the History department undergraduate program: top-notch lectures, amazing seminars, a new cohort of Senior Honors thesis students beginning their ambitious research projects, and more. In addition, the faculty had an especially important task to complete, submitting their courses for approval under the new IDEAs curriculum that starts in fall 2021. In October, department submitted over seventy syllabi for consideration, a promising sign of just how important History classes will remain in the general education curriculum at Carolina.
Changes were also afoot in the History major. In the fall, Brett Whalen and Matt Andrews oversaw the final stages of revising the History major to include several new thematic concentrations: Politics, Law, and Economy; Religion, Culture, and Intellectual Life; and War, Revolution, and Society. These new areas of study join existing thematic fields in the major, namely Women and Gender; Global; and Ancient/Medieval. The major also continues to include geographical concentrations in the history of Africa, Asia, and Middle East; the United States; Latin America; Europe; Russia, Eurasia, and Eastern Europe. The new major concentrations will official start in the fall 2021.
The department was gratified to offer financial support for undergraduate research and study abroad, including Boyatt funds awarded to Claude Wilson and Linda Cheng in support of the Senior Honors Thesis research; and to Whitney Sprinkle and Baekhanna Lee for their planned study abroad programs in Rome and Florence, respectively.
In the spring semester 2020, it was anything but business as usual. You can read elsewhere in this newsletter about how the department—faculty, graduate students, and staff—rose to the challenge of remote teaching our undergraduates with less than two weeks to prepare. The whole team did a fantastic job.
Some of our award programs, such as the Kusa Prize and spring Boyatt awards, intended to support undergraduate research and study abroad, were temporarily suspended during the spring semester. The department was delighted to award the Frank Ryan Prize for the best Senior Honors Thesis to Linda Cheng for her thesis “Without Identity, Voice, or Society? The Power of Student Perceptions in the 1989 Tiananmen Square Protests,” written under the supervision of Michael Tsin; and the Meador Prize for the best 398 research essay, given this year to Cara Price for her essay “Reds, Whites, and Blacks: Revolutionary Russia in the Black Press, 1910-1922,” written under the supervision of Don Raleigh.
Last but not least, the inaugural Cazel Prize for Excellence in History, part of the Chancellor’s Awards Ceremony, went to Mercer Brady. The Cazel Prize recognizes an outstanding graduating senior who has excelled in the study of history, contributed to the life of the History department, and shown a profound commitment to the values of the historical discipline. The prize committee decided that Mercer, a Buckley Public Service Scholar, the History department’s liaison with the Office of Undergraduate Research, and a member of the 2020 Senior Honors Thesis cohort among other activities, fit the bill perfectly.
The department was disappointed, to say the least, that we could not congratulate our graduating majors in person during the annual departmental recognition ceremony in Hamilton Hall. We did make a video offering those congratulations remotely and wishing our majors the best of luck as the move forward with their History degrees in these challenging times.