Gratitude, resilience, and pride are three words that come to my mind when considering my stint as acting Director of Graduate Studies this fall. This past semester, one of our most challenging, History graduate students collectively spent roughly 23,000 hours teaching UNC undergraduates. They coordinated working groups and speaker series. They ran the department’s Digital History Lab and have worked for Southern Oral History Project, the Ancient World Mapping Project, and the History Task Force. During the summer, Daniel Velásquez co-organized our tenth annual UNC-Kings College London graduate student workshop – and the first online iteration of the event. Nicole Harry, Sarah Miles, Emma Rothberg, Christian Walk offered wise counsel as members of the Graduate Studies Committee. Walk along with Patricia Dawson, Ben Fortun, and Laura Woods made vital contributions to the department’s newly formed Working Group on Equity and Inclusion. As we head into the new year, there is, of course, much collective work to be done we reckon with the legacies of white male supremacy in our department and university. There is also much to be done in the area of providing more funding for graduate students, whose financial struggles have only been amplified by the Covid-19 crisis. In these efforts, I am confident that graduate students will unite with faculty in tackling these and other challenges that lie ahead.
In addition to making vital contributions to our teaching mission and to the life of the department, our graduate students have shown remarkable grit in pursuit their degrees. They continue to excel, too, as just a few examples demonstrate. Rachel Cochran received a Fulbright-Hays fellowship to conduct research in Uzbekistan and India. Jose Moreno published a book chapter in Cambio cultural en territorios de frontera. Programas, procesos y apropiaciones Siglos XVII-XX, and Mark Reeves did the same in another edited volume, The League Against Imperialism: Lives and Afterlives. Mira Markham has a forthcoming article in Contemporary European History, one of the premier journals in the field. The awards and accomplishments continued well after graduation, of course. Robert Colby (2019) received the highly prestigious Allan Nevins Prize from the Society of American Historians, for his dissertation, “The Continuance of an Unholy Traffic: Slave Trading in the Civil War South.” A seemingly endless stream a book covers, each linked to information about works published by recent UNC History PhDs, can be found here.
In addition to publishing academic literature, UNC History graduate students contribute to the public good in other ways, too. Alexandra Odom recently received a Graduate School Impact Award for her work on “I’m Smart, Too”, an unflinching look at the history of racial discrimination and academic tracking in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro school district. (Odom’s work on this project got its start thanks to the department’s summer internship program.) Lucas Kelly and recent UNC PhD graduate Garrett W. Wright published an article about the history of stolen Indigenous lands and UNC’s founding in Scalawag Magazine. Patricia Dawson and Jessica Locklear helped to organize the recent pedagogical workshop, “Decolonizing the Classroom: Strategizing with Indigenous Allies,” along with other members of First Nations Graduate Circle. Marlon Londoño was a key to contributor to two episodes of Time Ghost History – one on the Ecuadorian-Peruvian War of 1941, the other about desert warfare tactics. Donald Santacaterina received a Maynard Adams Fellowship in Public Humanities from the Carolina Public Humanities Center for 2020-21. Kylie Broderick co-designed and co-taught a course on the Middle East for K-12 teachers hosted by the National Humanities Center. Recent PhD graduate Bret Devereaux published a piece about university finances and the Covid-19 crisis in The Atlantic magazine. All of this, by the way, is just the tip of the iceberg. As with so much teaching and mentoring outside the classroom, much of the work done by our graduate students often goes unnoticed. That work, however, is vital to success of our university, our society, and our democracy.