In the fall 2018, the History department inaugurated a new funding initiative aimed at fostering undergraduate research: the 398 Capstone Seminar Support Awards. These modest but important grants are intended to defray the costs of undergraduate travel to archives, libraries, and other historical sites, for the purpose of conducting research related to their 398 seminars. (Required of all majors, 398 seminars involve the production of a substantial article-length essays, based on original research with primary source materials.) The first round of awards went to Coby Devito related to his project “Roosevelt, Congress, and World War II: How Public Opinion Failed to Shape United States Foreign Policy Prior to the Second World War” (advised by Klaus Larres); to Robert Williams for his project “Focus on Failure: Why Focquismo was destined to fail” (Miguel La Serna); to Joshua Rodriguez for his work “Hope Through Defiance: Che Guevara and Latin American Autonomy” (La Serna); and to Kess Hendrix for her essay “Africans in Art: Visual Representations of Africans During the Slave Trade and Abolition Era” (Lisa Lindsay). All of these students carried out research at various locations in and around Washington, D.C., including the Library of Congress and the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Continuing its tradition of supporting our majors who study abroad, History also awarded fall Boyatt funds to Thomas Armacost for study abroad at the University of Oslo; to Jacob Koehler, at Lund University in Sweden; to Tyler Brown at King’s College in London; and to Julia Herring at UNC Montpellier.
Taking advantage of funding initiatives offered by the “Quality Enhancement Plan” (QEP), some of our faculty launched or began planning new courses that engage with the interdisciplinary, methodologically self-conscious spirit of the QEP. Specifically, three History faculty are involved in this year’s learning group for the “Research Related Skills” (RRS) courses. In fall 2018, Eren Tasar has been teaching a class on “Nation and Religion in Russia.” In spring 2018, Brett Whalen will be teaching a RRS course on the “Medieval University,” building upon the research questions raised in his team-taught (with Chris Clemens from Physics) First Year Seminar, “Time and the Medieval Cosmos.” That same semester, Ben Waterhouse will offer a RRS course “Taking Research Public,” that will guide students from various fall 398 seminars through the process of revising their historical essays for publication.