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Summary Description The University of Connecticut History Department supports a variety of informal and formal activities to promote intellectual community throughout the academic year. Socially, the department sponsors an opening picnic for graduate students and faculty and a pot-luck Christmas party. Administratively, it involves graduate students in all our searches and solicits their evaluation of all candidates. Intellectually, it runs several speakers' series on topics of broad interest for historians. The ethos of the department encourages close faculty-graduate student relations, with a fair bit of socializing outside of class (and in faculty homes). Intellectual community has its primary foundation in the specialized units offering the doctorate. Faculty and graduate students in European and Latin American history gather on a monthly basis for talks and discussion of common readings; a long-running Foreign Policy seminar brings together both local and area-wide faculty and graduate students several times a year to hear visiting speakers. Yet, vital subcommunities do not insure a "robust" intellectual community on the departmental level. Prompted both by the Carnegie initiative and by the influx of new faculty, we are making efforts to transcend older area-based divisions and to forge new arenas of communication across the department. A new departmental colloquium on "The History of the Americas in the Atlantic World" is being inaugurated as a setting for faculty and graduate students to give papers, discuss shared readings, and hear occasional guests. Socially, we are creating a series of events meant to get us together more regularly and on a more inclusive basis. Wine-and-cheese parties will be held in the late afternoon on the "First Thursdays" or Fridays of each month during the academic year. Partners will be welcome and child care provided to make sure that no one is left out.
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Tools and Resources Various colloquia, speakers' series, and conferences sponsored by the department are the principal means for promoting intellectual community among history faculty and graduate students. Some center on themes of interest to all historians, whatever their chronological or geographical emphasis. Others address subjects of pertinence to particular subgroups, such as the Foreign Policy Seminar. The following are a few of our activities, with links to the departmental website: * Visiting Scholars in Gender and History: a program, now in its eighth year, that brings leading and innovative scholars in this interdisciplinary field for two-day visits to campus, where they deliver public lectures, present pre-circulated papers to a small colloquium, and consult with individual students on research topics and other interests. Three or four speakers have come annually. This year's series is linked below. * The Fusco Distinguished Lecture: annual event featuring an eminent historian -- the Chinese historian Jonathan Spence in 2004, the U.S. historian Edward Ayers in 2005 -- speaking on a topic of wide interest to a campus- and community-wide audience. Followed by a reception and dinner. The Fusco lecture is featured on the webpage linked below. * Foreign Policy Seminar: launched in 1985, the seminar aims to foster community among people interested in international relations. It brings together faculty and graduate students from UConn and New England-area schools and non-academics in Connecticut twice a semester to hear speakers from within and outside the region. WIth a mailing list of some 200, the series has a large constituency, many of whom look forward to receiving the synopsis of each talk prepared by a graduate student. Receptions before and after the talks give ample time for socializing. See link below to this year's series. Formal lectures in these series are followed by receptions and dinners. To enable graduate student participation, the History Department subsidizes the dinners by charging a below-cost student rate. * The Draper Graduate Conference in Early American Studies: with support from the Draper Chair, graduate students organize and host a national conference on a broad theme in the history of early America in the Atlantic world. They choose the year's topic, issue the call for papers, serve as a program committee to select presenters and design the conference program, and invite distinguished outside speakers. This year's conference, "Coming to Our Senses: Rediscovering Early America" (Nov. 10-12), calls attention to emerging scholarship on the history of the senses. It is being held in collaboration with the American Antiquarian Society (see link to the program below).
Visiting Scholars in Gender and History
Fusco Distinguished Lecture
Foreign Policy Seminar
Draper Graduate Conference
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Obstacles to Community Community is a problematic term for the mutual activities, both intellectual and social, we hope to foster among faculty and doctoral students. It evokes intense associations of belonging and connectedness at odds with the organization of life at contemporary universities. *Fractured lives, fragmented schedules: few people use their offices daily, and so the informal conversations that once flourished in the corridors and the social ties they promoted now erode. Home offices, connected by internet, make work more efficient, but reduce face-to-face contact and can isolate individuals. *Identification with subcommunities: as the Carnegie survey of faculty makes plain, faculty in most disciplines identify and engage most actively with those in their subareas of scholarship. Wider identities - and the commitments they entail -- give way to specialized involvements. *Too much to do, too little time: a problem everywhere. Under these circumstances, we question the appropriateness of "community" as the right term for the collective activities we want to foster. "Community" is all-embracing. It suggests that to be a responsible faculty member or graduate student in a department, one has to join "the community." We prefer the alternative term "public life." The public life of the department consists of those specific activities -- lectures, social occasions, colloquia -- officially sponsored, collectively endorsed -- that all faculty and graduate students are expected to join in as frequently as possible. Such participation is integral to departmental citizenship; it is presented as a norm. It then becomes the obligation of the department to invent ways to facilitate participation in its public life. We are instituting the following measures: * standard calendar of events, announced well in advance: time slots reserved for department and committee meetings; likewise for lectures and social events (see link below) * pro-active steps to enable participation by all, such as provision of child care and subsidized meals * collective involvement in planning and organizing events * regular communication of news about faculty and graduate students (via a departmental listserv) * use of common spaces as for lunch-room and casual interactions A department can support an inclusive public life for all. It cannot guarantee community.
Calendar of Events 2005-2006
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Exemplary Element: Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean History With the appointment of four full-time faculty in the history of the Americas, this subarea is building a strong intellectual community embracing colleagues and students in related areas: * The Institute for Puerto Rican and Latino Studies hosts an informal tertulia speaker series, an informal lunch gathering to share recent research by visiting scholars and UCONN professors and students; * The Latin American Studies program hosts a monthly colloquium for graduate students at the on-campus hotel, the Nathan Hale inn, with beer and appetizers gratis; * most recently, a creative website calls attention to research activities by faculty and graduate students, including a working papers series available for download; to course offerings; and to the calendar of pertinent lectures for the upcoming academic year. See the link below. Electronic communications and face-to-face meetings, faciliated by informal meals and socializing, are orchestrated to build community. The new department colloquium on the history of the Americas in the Atlantic World is meant to build conversations between participants in this subarea and colleagues in related fields within the department -- and potentially will foster new configurations of interest.
Latin American History website
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How Do We Know? Only in the most informal ways does the department assess its climate for community. Nobody is required to attend lectures or colloquia. And nobody takes attendance. Like most academic departments, we rely upon the sense of shared obligation and mutual commitment that have been traditional in the university "community" and that have been eroding everywhere. Certainly, there are official channels of communication by which graduate students, through the official History Graduate Student Association, can express oncerns to the chair or to the graduate director. At the opening orientation, the graduate director conveys the importance of participating in the public life of the department and reinforces that message in the required first-semester introductory seminar. Presumably, students will treat these injunctions as a norm and internalize the expectations. But the vitality of community -- or public life -- surely derives from the breadth of participation and the liveliness of activities, and these can be gauged best by first-hand involvement and after-the-fact reports. A strong colloquium series might also generate new collaborations and presentations. A robust community, it seems, is visible chiefly in action and appreciated in experience.
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Unanswered Questions What do you do when you hold a party and nobody comes? How can departments overcome faculty and graduate student resistance to adding ever-more obligations to busy schedules? Should participation in departmental activities designed to enhance public life be considered obligatory? Should non-participation be deemed a failure of colleagueship and service and treated accordingly in merit reviews? What techniques work best to facilitate equal graduate student participation with faculty in departmental colloquia? How can students develop the confidence to challenge leading members of the faculty? Intellectual communities can develop inflationary tendencies, with ever-more claims on members' time. How do you know when it is time to retire particular activities and serach for new modes of conducting public life?
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