Graduate Education

At a recent conference on African Atlantic Culture, History and Performance, one of the keynote speakers encouraged participants to consider how we deploy history.  While the word deploy can mean simply “use,” it also has connotations that suggest a more deliberate and even strategic function.  As we face new questions concerning open universities and universal access, how do those possibilities change the way we as scholars imagine “deploying” our history and our methodologies?  How do we envision the audiences for those new venues deploying history in their own turn?  What is the difference between teaching our students to deploy/use history vs. simply absorb/know it?  If there is a difference? How might it change the ways we approach our pedagogy and our research?  Should it?


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When I wrote History Takes Time, I was preparing to go up for tenure. I was also advising a number of graduate students who felt they simply did not have time to do their work. I was distraught, as I felt and still do that we are conditioned more and more aggressively to be almost surgically strategic in doing our research.  My own experience in largely unorganized archives in Mexico had taught me that some of the most important discoveries in doing historiographical research come from what you do not know is present before you begin that work, from looking at what else is in the file, from what articles and ads surround the newspaper article you had to read to do your work. [Read More]

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