A Message from the Chair
By Kevin Boyle
We’re about a month away from graduation, which means that we’ve entered celebration season on campus. As I walk to class, I invariably pass students posing for pictures in their purple robes; last Friday’s group had a few bottles of champagne waiting for them once they’d finished their photo shoot out on Deering Meadow. And almost every day, it seems, one university unit or another is holding a year-ending symposium or reception in Harris Hall’s elegant Leopold Room.
Here in the History Department, we’ve got a lot to celebrate too. Students continue to flock to our undergraduate courses. In 2023-24 we had our highest enrollments in a decade. This year we’ve increased our numbers again. U.S. News and World Report recently ranked our graduate program among the top ten History Ph.D. programs in the nation. And we’re thrilled to welcome two new colleagues to our ranks. This winter we hired Alexandra Montero Peters, a specialist in Medieval Iberia, to fill the position opened by the retirement of the irreplaceable Dyan Elliot. A Chicagoland native, Ali will be coming home after two years on the tenure track at Texas State University. She’ll be joined by Zavier Nunn, a scholar of twentieth-century European Trans history, whom we hired last year in a joint search with Gender and Sexuality Studies. Zavier deferred his arrival so he could take a prestigious post-doctoral fellowship at Columbia. Now he’s on his way to Evanston.
The spring is ending with a flurry of recognition. Two weeks ago Julie Hoather, our fabulous Graduate Program Coordinator, received Weinberg College’s Community Builder Award for her tireless work on the department’s behalf. Last week, Kate Masur and Amy Stanley were formally appointed to endowed professorships, Kate as the John D. MacArthur Chair and Amy as the Orrington Lunt Professor. A couple of days from now, Caitlin Fitz will be awarded the Charles Deering McCormick Professorship of Teaching Excellence, the university’s highest teaching prize. The week after that, Doug Kiel will receive Weinberg’s Distinguished Teaching Award and Aaron Wilford the College’s Outstanding Graduate Student Teacher Award. As if all that weren’t enough, we’re still reveling in the recent news that Akin Ogundiran has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Yet it doesn’t feel like a celebratory season. Not this year.
The Trump administration launched its assault on higher education four months ago. We’ve certainly felt its effect. When the National Institutes of Health dramatically reduced its payment of indirect costs to research universities, Northwestern ordered an immediate ten percent cut to every department’s operating budget, including those – like ours – that don’t receive NIH funding. Since then, the White House has gutted programs that we do rely on to support our research, such as the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Fulbright Fellowship. And it has threatened the independence of the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, and the National Park Service, which together form much of the infrastructure for historical scholarship in the United States.
The fundamental danger we face isn’t financial or institutional, though. It’s intellectual. Last month, the NEH’s new leadership abruptly cancelled a fellowship that Daniel Immerwahr had won last year. It was doing so, the Acting Chairman said in the form letter Daniel received, because the NEH was “repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President’s agenda.” President Trump has been perfectly clear in saying what his agenda entails. He wants to limit the scope of historical study – particularly on questions of race, gender, and the environment – and to replace what he sees as the “distorted narrative[s]” that historians have created with stories that reflect and reinforce his sense of the world.
This isn’t simply a political move. It’s an existential threat to what we do. In my time at Harris Hall, I’ve marveled at my colleagues’ devotion to our discipline. They dig deeply into the historical record and from the often-recalcitrant sources they find there, develop with care, compassion, and professional integrity new understandings of the past. Of course those understandings are interpretive. That’s the nature of historical scholarship. And sometimes the results are disturbing; it’s impossible to take on many of the subjects my colleagues tackle without opening wounds. But it’s also impossible to heal a wound by pretending that it isn’t there.
We know how lucky we are to be at a university whose administration vigorously supports our ability to go wherever our scholarship takes us, despite the intense pressure it’s under. Too many historians at other institutions can’t say the same. On behalf of the department, I want to extend our thanks to President Michael Schill, Provost Kathleen Hagerty, and Dean Adrian Randolph. Enormous thanks as well to the superb staff members – Christina Alexandru, Susan Delrahim, Lorrie Graham, Julie Hoather, and Annerys Cano, our amazing business manager – who keep the department running with skill, grace, and good humor. And thanks to you, our alumni, for your generous support of our work. We are so grateful.
Sincerely,
Kevin Boyle