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Welcome to the Web Page of the History Department at the University of Miami! With this brief introductory letter let me thank you for visiting our website and give you a quick overview of our program, our objectives and goals, and a little taste of the excitement that animates our program here at the University of Miami. We pride ourselves on being a small, high quality program that provides first-rate teaching for both undergraduate and graduate students; an active collection of scholars who are doing cutting edge research and publishing important work of wide-ranging interest; and a collegial group that enjoys working with our students, fellow scholars, and the broader community to make history come alive and enrich our culture and our lives. At Miami our classes are small and we have the opportunity to work closely with students at all levels from broad ranging introductory courses to graduate seminars. One advantage of those close working relationships is that we pride ourselves on not just imparting knowledge, but stimulating students to think critically. For history with its study of how people function in complex social and cultural environments that change over time is an ideal discipline for honing the skills necessary to think clearly and critically – the kind of critical thinking that allows one not only to be a good historian, but also a good lawyer, doctor, politician, business person or simply a thoughtful, cultured, engaged adult. Thus we stress a slightly different three Rs – reading and writing of course, but also reasoning – and we are very proud of the results. Our students have gone on to become teachers at all levels from kindergarten to research university professors in the US and abroad, but many have also become lawyers, doctors, politicians, business leaders and, most importantly, cultured, thoughtful people. We like to think that we make history at UM literally by helping to form the people who lead our society and enrich it with their intellectual range, vision and critical thinking. The opening of the academic year 2008-2009 brings with it a number of changes. The Chair of our Department, Professor Guido Ruggiero, is enjoying a long overdue and well-deserved leave in Italy where he is currently writing a major synthetic work on the Italian Renaissance. He will return as Chair in August 2009. In the interim, I am functioning as Acting Chair. We have also hired a new faculty member, Karl Gunther (Northwestern, 2007), who focuses on the intellectual origins of Puritanism and early modern religion more broadly. In addition, we are happy to welcome William Max Nelson (UCLA, 2006) to our department as a Visiting Assistant Professor for the academic year 2008-2009. William works on the French Enlightenment. In addition, two faculty members are away from Miami on research leave. Martin Nesvig spent spring semester 2008 on an NEH Fellowship at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, RI and is now on Junior Faculty Leave doing research in Mexico City. Dominique Reill received a Fellowship from the Italian Academy at Columbia University where she will reside for the academic year 2008-2009 working on her book manuscript on nationalism and transnationalism in the Adriatic. This year we are advertising for a new faculty member in East Asia, Southeast Asia, or South Asia. Next year we will run a search for a historian of post-1945 United States. Future hires will include senior scholars in Latin American/Caribbean and further expansion in modern Europe. In terms of research and publication, the record of our relatively small faculty (twenty-two fulltime members) is truly outstanding. We have published more than sixty volumes with many of the most outstanding presses in the world (among them, Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Chicago, California, Blackwell, and more) and literally innumerable articles have appeared in major historical and interdisciplinary journals. Several new books are in the immediate offing. Three members of our department have won the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Our faculty has also been awarded a host of other major research awards including National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships, Fulbright Fellowships, American Philosophical Society Fellowships, National Library of Medicine Fellowships, and received invitations to many prominent residential research institutions both in the US and elsewhere. In addition, two faculty members currently hold three-year Cooper Fellowships for scholarly distinction from the College of Arts and Sciences. The department has been particularly engaged in publishing on issues of race, gender, and urban development in modern America; culture, sex, and society in the early modern world (including the Americas); Latin American and Caribbean social and cultural history, colonial and modern; politics, economics, and culture in modern Europe; and on the African Diaspora and its multiple impacts. Our graduate students, too, have been exceedingly active in presenting papers at national and international conferences, publishing articles, and receiving grants both from within the university and from outside it. They are our future and we are very proud of them. Yet perhaps the hardest positive feature of our department to measure is the most important. Walking our halls, pausing for a coffee in our lounge, dropping by the departmental offices, one repeatedly encounters knots of students and faculty – from all over the world – involved in conversation: earnest, quiet, excited, laughing, lively, and thoughtful. A similar lively collegiality infuses departmental functions, whether they are the periodic visits of noted colleagues from around the world who come to discuss their ideas and research, our own more or less formal discussions of our research, or simply the periodic celebrations that mark out the academic calendar. As historians we work a great deal on our own, late into the night and early in the morning. But supporting and enriching that solitary labor, we enjoy a rare community of colleagues, students, and friends (including the Friends of History, a formal support group made up of alumni and supporters of the department). Together we all share the pleasures and the excitement of making history at UM. I hope that your visit to our website will give you some sense of that excitement, at least until you can visit our department in person. Mary Lindemann |
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