Conversations with the Dean

Featuring Professor Daniel Immerwahr

And Featuring Professor Kate Masur

Professor Daniel Immerwahr and Dean Adrian Randolph discuss a variety of subjects including why the teaching of history is essential and his upcoming book on fire history in the United States.

Daniel Immerwahr is the Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities and Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence. He is a scholar of U.S. and global history. His first book, the award-winning Thinking Small, is about U.S. grassroots development campaigns, at home and abroad. His second, How to Hide an Empire, is a narrative history of the United States that brings its overseas territories into the story. That book was a national bestseller and a New York Times critic’s choice for one of the best books of 2019; it has been translated into seven languages. Immerwahr writes frequently for magazines and newspapers; his work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Guardian, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Harper’s, and the New York Review of Books, among other places. He is now writing a fire history of the United States.

Featuring Professor Kate Masur

Professor Kate Masur and Dean Adrian Randolph discuss how her latest book, Freedom Was in Sight! draws on the words and experiences of people who lived during Reconstruction, as well as her teaching approach and the evolving style to teaching history in today’s classrooms.

Kate Masur is the John D. MacArthur Chair at Northwestern. In addition to Freedom was in Sight!, she’s also the author of Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History and a New York Times "critics' pick" for 2021. She sometimes writes about legal history and has contributed to amicus briefs in several court cases, including an historians’ brief in the SFFA case that she and her co-author later turned into a journal article. She enjoys collaborating with museums and other nonprofits and has worked with the National Park Service, the National Constitution Center, the Newberry Library, and the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture. She also frequently works with K-12 teachers and speaks with the media on topics including the Civil War and Reconstruction, Abraham Lincoln, monuments, and public memory.