Teaching Fellows Spotlight

Students who graduate from a University of Chicago PhD Program in the Social Sciences are eligible to apply for a Social Sciences Teaching Fellowship. Typically, the fellowship begins the year after completing the PhD and lasts for two years. This year, the history department has eight graduates in the program. Three of them participated in an interview about their experience and goals. Below are their answers, listed individually, to a short set of questions about the program.  

1. How has your PhD program prepared you for the Teaching Fellowship?

Arthur Clement
The PhD program prepared me to the thinking historically and to develop a deep interest in historical problems that I am able to convey when I am teaching. The material exictes me and that makes it possible to exicte students. Knowledge of historical problems and the practice you gain in making arguments as a PhD student allowed me to craft a syllabus that was at once my own, incorporated the common readings for Euro Civ, and had a thread. I do wish that I'd had an opportunity to be an instructor of record during the PhD program, but the changes to funding model and introduction of MTE's meant that I completed all my teaching as a TA by the start of my fourth year. It was an adjustment to recall what undergraduate writing was like and it happened that in those three years of focus on research, Gen AI appeared.

Caine Jordan
In the History PhD program, I served as a teaching fellow and teaching assistant. I was also able to teach a course I co-designed with a fellow graduate student.

Hannah Park
I think my teaching experience in History and the Writing Program during the PhD has prepared me well for my role as instructor in the BA thesis seminar, where I’ll be advising undergraduate research and writing. I found the Writing Program’s pedagogy training especially valuable, and the independence I was offered in running my sections helped me build confidence in facilitating discussions and seminar-style classes.

I also had quite a few opportunities to practice course design. For example, one of my committee members asked me to develop a sample syllabus as part of oral exam prep, and I also created several mock syllabi while working as a research assistant for course development in the Gender and Sexuality in World Civilizations sequence. Even informational sessions, such as the department’s meeting on the Von Holst Lectureship, helped me think more strategically about course design and its fit in the departmental landscape. All of this has shaped the way I approached creating and now teaching my elective course, Tracing Korea’s Twentieth-Century Diasporas.

2. What have you most enjoyed or, if new, are you most looking forward to in the position?

Arthur Clement
Once I got into a rythym with students, especially in their second quarter with, I enjoyed going to class each day and discussing the texts with them. I also enjoyed working with them in office hours to improve their analysis and argumentation in writing and seeing them make strides and become more independent readers and thinkers. Of course, not all students appreciated that kind of challenge, and I learned from my first year to remember that Core classes are more like courses for non-majors even though you have advanced humanities students in them.

Caine Jordan
I have enjoyed seeing my students make meaningful connections between class literature and their current realities. For instance, in teaching Colonizations I in the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity, I have been able to help my students make connections between colonization in the Latin American, African, and Native American contexts and what is currently happening in the world. I found that experience quite enriching.

Hannah Park
I’ve really appreciated the Chicago Center for Teaching and Learning’s support for new instructors. At their September Symposium, I learned about resources I didn’t know were available—like collaborating with the Feitler Center for Academic Inquiry at the Smart Museum to incorporate their collections into non-art courses, or applying for Chicago Studies micro-grants to support experiential learning. I was able to invite two guest speakers this quarter through a micro-grant, and I am now planning a classroom visit to the Smart Museum with support from their staff.

The symposium also gave me practical tips from experienced instructors and useful tools for interactive lecturing. The highlight, though, was hearing directly from undergraduates on a student panel—their candid thoughts about assignments, classroom practices, and even AI were invaluable. Beyond teaching, as a parent of young children, I’ve also been grateful for more affordable insurance options compared to graduate school. Overall, I’m excited to engage with a broader range of students and colleagues, while continuing to draw on the many workshops and resources the campus offers.

3. How do you understand the fellowship intersecting with your current research project? What are you working on?

Arthur Clement
There has been a strong intersection between the fellowship and my research. I was able to design syllabus around larger question that came out of my research, namely how to do we understand what secularization or secular modernity is if it did quite happen in the way that we thought. Euro Civ gave me a change to reconsider certain aspects of the question in a longue durée perspective and to read primary texts that eventually helped me rewrite the first chapter of my disseration for publication as an article. The other reason that I wish I could have taught on my own while in the PhD program was that the longue durée perspective helped me see that the eighteenth century debate over a natural morality and a society of atheists was where I should have started by disseration. The argument continued to play out over the nineteenth century, especially after the chaos of the Revolution.

Caine Jordan

I'll take the second question first. My first project looks at a Black physician in the Jim Crow North and his coordination of public health clinics treating addiction in the city of Chicago. I look at his coordination with social groups, press outlets, judges, police, and state officials. And I look what went right, what could have factored into the dissolution of the clinics, and how this could impact future studies of addiction and addiction therapy. My second project examines Black abortionists pre-Roe and their communities to tell an alternative history of the relation between Black communities and reproductive health. My course on the Histories of Abortion and Forced Sterilization zeroes in on the experiences of women of color in the American medical system, their struggles against the state and for bodily autonomy. This self-designed course has helped me to think even more deeply and critically about how I approach to public health and human rights in my current research.

Hannah Park
Alongside teaching, I’m revising my dissertation, Writing Home, Writing Hope, into a book manuscript tentatively titled Writing Home: Remapping Korea’s Separated Families through the Epistolary Lens. The book manuscript sharpens the framework of the dissertation by telling a clearer story of separation, mediation, and (non-)return. I’ve restructured the chapters by removing one and adding two new ones: one on Ahn Chang-ho’s letters to his family in the United States, which reveal tensions between nationalist activism and private family obligations, and another on unsent letters between South Korean birth mothers and adoptees, which capture unfulfilled or unknowable dimensions of kinship. I’m also bringing in newly available sources, such as recently published material on Yi Chungsŏp and his wife Yamamoto Masako, and situating my analysis of North Korean orphans’ letters in conversation with newer scholarship like Jack Neubauer’s monograph on the “adoption plan” in China. Together, the chapters highlight how letters not only sustained family ties across distances but also reshaped ideas of family, homeland, and belonging in modern Korean history.

In addition, I’m working on two smaller projects that didn’t fit into the book manuscript: one on the letters of Alice Hyun, a Communist Korean/American eldest daughter in 1930s Hawai‘i, and another on decades-long correspondence between a Korean artist-pastor and an American missionary. I’m also contributing a chapter to an edited volume on exile narratives in East and Southeast Asia; the chapter will closely read a 1957 diary by a Sakhalin Korean exile whose life was marked by colonialism, forced labor, and separation from his homeland. 

These projects inform my teaching, for instance, by showing students how questions of gendered labor, informal channels of care, and multi-layered displacement can be explored through personal writings like letters and diaries. I also see the concept of diaspora as a powerful pedagogical lens that helps students engage more deeply with history—particularly by embracing difference, disrupting hegemonic narratives, and emphasizing human desire for “home.”

4. As your primary appointment is in the Core, I’d love to understand more about your perspective on the value of the Core sequence you teach in and how you develop relationships with your students.

Caine Jordan
The Colonizations sequence has changed the way that both my students and I view the world. I have had several students come to after the course and mention that, with the knowledge they had gained, they were able to better articulate their thoughts on the current moment. I have found myself thinking more critically about race and racialization, colonization, narratives on gender, economic opportunity, and the boundaries of bondage, servitude, and freedom. 

5. What are your plans beyond the teaching fellowship and how do you think the fellowship prepares you to meet those goals?

Arthur Clement
I am still formulating my plans, but I will apply both to academic and non-academic jobs this year.

Caine Jordan
Beyond the teaching fellowship, my plan is to continue in the academy as a professor. I will continue to edit the chapters of my book, publish related articles, and begin work on my second project. My time in the fellowship has helped me conceive of new ideas and find many potential collaborators for new projects.

Hannah Park
Looking ahead, I plan to continue in both research and teaching. The fellowship provides an ideal balance: flexibility to pursue my scholarship, strong pedagogical support for experiential learning, and the chance to work closely with undergraduates on a wide range of thesis projects. I know this combination will give me rich, hands-on teaching experience while also allowing me to make significant progress on my book manuscript and other research. I’m genuinely excited for the next two years and the opportunity to grow as both a teacher and a scholar.