On July 1, 2018, the UNC History Department welcomed Dr. Lisa Lindsay as its new Department Chair.
Dr. Lindsay, a historian of Africa, has been a UNC-Chapel Hill faculty member since 1999 and has previously served as the Department’s Director of Undergraduate Studies and as Chair of the Committee on Teaching. Prior to joining the UNC-Chapel Hill History Department, Dr. Lindsay was an Assistant Professor at UNC-Charlotte and taught at University of Michigan, where she received her PhD in 1996. Although Dr. Lindsay’s research has largely focused on West Africa, her most recent work has explored the transatlantic connections between Africa and the Americas fostered by the international slave trade.
While the department may expect some changes as a result of the change in administration, Dr. Lindsay does not foresee the need for a major transformation. For this, she credits outgoing chair, Dr. W. Fitzhugh Brundage.
“Fitz was a great chair,” Dr. Lindsay said. “He left the Department in really good shape in ways that are both visible and invisible to most people. It has made my job much smoother than it would otherwise have been that he created and maintained robust procedures and structures for the Department.”
She noted in particular the strength of the staff, many of whom began working in the Department during Dr. Brundage’s tenure. “They are highly skilled and also really dedicated to making sure the Department works well,” Dr. Lindsay said.
Dr. Lindsay also spoke of the faculty as one of the Department’s greatest assets. UNC’s historians are well-published and highly respected for their research contributions in their respective subfields. While this is often the case at large research universities, Dr. Lindsay noted that the UNC’s History Department’s faculty is distinctive in its dedication to teaching and service in addition to research.
“It’s not always the case that the people who are experts in their fields are also dedicated teachers,” Dr. Lindsay said, “and I’m really proud of the fact that our Department takes public engagement very seriously.”
Despite these strengths, Dr. Lindsay noted that she and her colleagues on the History Department’s executive committee—Associate Chair Benjamin Waterhouse, Director of Graduate Studies Sarah Shields, and Director of Undergraduate Studies Brett Whalen—will be working to address some challenges the Department faces.
“The biggest challenge is declining undergraduate enrollments, which is part of a national trend affecting the humanities more broadly,” Dr. Lindsay said.
Maintaining and improving enrollment figures is crucial not only because the faculty values expanding undergraduates’ understanding of history but also because funding from the university rests largely on such statistics. Nevertheless, the executive committee has already begun to develop programs to draw students to History courses. “We’ve got some new initiatives that will be unveiled little by little over the course of the year,” Dr. Lindsay said.
The executive committee will also devote much attention to the problem of graduate student funding.
“We get fabulous graduate students who do terrific work while they’re here and go on to bigger and better things in spite of the fact that we offer pretty paltry resources, especially compared to our peer institutions,” Dr. Lindsay said.
Dr. Lindsay acknowledged that the Department’s ability to support graduate students is limited by the funding constraints imposed by College of Arts and Sciences and the UNC Graduate School in addition to its own financial limitations. Nevertheless, the executive committee continues to seek new methods to assist students through their graduate education and to prepare them for the job markets they will face upon graduating.
“We are continuing to think creatively about how we might offer more support to the graduate students and also how we might equip them for a diversity of careers after their graduate degrees.”
As a historian of African history herself, Dr. Lindsay is also particularly excited to highlight and expand the Department’s programs in Global and African History, even as she continues to promote its more traditional strengths in United States, European, and other fields of history.
“We’ve been teaching and practicing global history, but we haven’t really promoted it to the extent that we could,” Dr. Lindsay said. “It’s really special and sets our Department apart that we have a PhD in Global History, and we have a brand new PhD program in African History.”
Dr. Lindsay’s experience within the Department prior to her tenure as chair will prove invaluable as she sets the course for its future. Her service as Director of Undergraduate Studies and as Chair of the Committee on Teaching have equipped her with a thorough understanding of the undergraduate program and the work that graduate students perform as teaching assistants. She thus takes on her new role as chair with a strong sense not only of the difficulties it faces but also of potential actions that she and the executive committee can take to guide the Department in a positive direction.