Chair’s Welcome

It’s my great pleasure to welcome colleagues and students to a new academic year here in the Department of History. For academics like us the beginning of Autumn is always the most exciting time of the year. We return to campus full of ideas garnered from a summer of reading and conversations carried out in research sites scattered across the world, and we look forward to a new year in which every day will surely bring new surprises, inspirations, and challenges. As the quarter begins, we welcome new cohorts of students at both undergraduate and graduate levels. And we welcome too to our ranks Thuto Thipe, who became an assistant professor in the Department in July. The coming year will see all of us – faculty and students alike – make exciting new discoveries and build challenging new claims about all aspects of the human past from Antiquity to the present. In fact, the first week of the quarter sees the publication of the first faculty book of the year! Congratulations to Samuel Fury Childs Daly, whose Soldier’s Paradise: Militarism in Africa after Empire (Duke University Press), hot off the press on October 4, casts light on the ideology of military revolutions in modern Africa. 

Please keep an eye on the Department’s News and Events sites to make sure that you don’t miss events and achievements as they occur through the year. Among the highlights to look out for already are the Cochrane, John Hope Franklin, and Shapiro Lectures, which are slated to take place in the Winter and Spring Quarters. We are also searching for a historian of the ancient mediterranean world, which should mean that we host candidates on campus early in the new year. And in the very near future, October 11 is the date for “History and Literature in Latin America,” a symposium in honor of our colleague Dain Borges. For other projects and opportunities, watch this space!