A Message from the Chair

I woke up a little after 6:00 AM last October 13 and meandered down to the kitchen to get my morning routine under way. I flipped on the coffee maker, poured myself a bowl of cereal, and – in a part of the ritual I really ought to break – checked my email. There, at the top of my inbox, was a cryptic message from a friend at the University of Galway. “Big day at Northwestern,” it read. “Great joy among his Irish pals,” followed by a link to a story from CNN.

That’s how I learned that Joel Mokyr had won the Nobel Prize.

It was a fitting way to find out. Joel won the Nobel for his brilliant work on the factors that fostered the transformative economic growth of the past three hundred years. One of the key forces, he says, was the development of the Republic of Letters: a transnational community of intellectuals committed to rationality and reason, empowered by the universities that gave them homes and by the political systems that allowed them to freely exchange their ideas across borders that, under different circumstances, might have divided them.

Joel doesn’t just write about that community. He embodies it. Early in his illustrious career, he wrote an important book on the Irish famine. In the process, he connected with some of Ireland’s leading historians. They’ve been colleagues, collaborators, and friends ever since. His pals, as my friend said in his email, were celebrating his triumph while most of us on this side of the Atlantic were still fast asleep.

I don’t know how many more Nobel prizes my colleagues are going to win. But I do know that the commitments that have driven Joel’s work drive theirs too. We’ve built our own little Republic of Letters in Harris Hall, through the Chabraja Center’s marvelous lecture series, which just a few weeks ago featured a talk by one of Mexico’s foremost historians; through the faculty-led conferences that the Center supports, the most recent of which brought together scholars of Early Modern Europe and South Asia for two days of presentations and conversations; and through our regular works-in-progress seminar, where we read and discuss a colleague’s latest article or chapter while it’s still in draft form. Last year our grad students started their own version, without a faculty member in sight.

Our little Republic feeds into the wider one. You can read about my colleagues’ recent accomplishments by clicking on the “faculty news” link on the left side of this page. Look for the ten books they’ve published, the numerous articles they’ve written, and the many lectures they’ve delivered – in Singapore, Beijing, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Taipei, London, Durham, Oxford, Paris, Naples, Lisbon, Toronto, and across the United States – since this time last year. Also look for the ways they’ve brought their scholarship to bear on some of the most urgent issues our time. I’ll mention just two prime examples. Lina Britto recently contributed an important essay on the drug economy to the commemorative report of Colombia’s Historical Commission on the Armed Conflict and Its Victims, one of that nation’s key mechanisms for confronting the legacies of its brutal civil war. And Kate Masur and a colleague at Johns Hopkins provided their expertise to the Brennan Center for Justice in its defense of birthright citizenship.

The principles that shape our scholarship guide our teaching too. Every year, we offer our students a curriculum that stretches across a vast span of time and space. This year’s classes reach from Medieval Japan to the United States in the 1990s, with courses on global legal history, global cities, and the global history of prisons added to the mix. In the Winter Quarter Robin Bates finished his third year directing our fabulous Sanders seminar, which invites a select group of undergraduates to engage with cutting-edge history and the historians who write it. And next week Scott Sowerby, who teaches a decidedly transnational and wildly popular course on pirates, will receive the Alumnae of Northwestern Teaching professorship, the university’s highest teaching award. Our efforts seem to be working: our enrollments climbed again this year, to their highest point since the 2011-12 school year.

We’re also painfully aware that the openness that’s central to our work is under attack. Unlike faculty at a growing number of public universities, we’re not being told what we can and cannot teach. But this year private pressure groups have tried to intimidate a few of our colleagues. We can still research and write whatever we want, but if we take on subjects that the Trump administration doesn’t like we’ll have no chance of securing the federal fellowships that until a year ago supported a wide range of scholarship in the humanities. And we’re still free to travel outside the United States to visit archives or consult with colleagues in our field, except for those department members who are in the U.S. on visas and now have to worry that once they leave the country they won’t be allowed to return.

The current constraints fall particularly heavily on our students – our international graduate students most of all, whose presence in our department reflects the expansive intellectual life that the Republic of Letters created. A life we have to defend as strenuously as we can, because our students shouldn’t have to inherit a world narrowed by the fall of a Republic we didn’t try to save.

I’ll close with a couple of important acknowledgements. We couldn’t do our work without the History department’s fabulous staff. Enormous thanks to Christina Alexandru, Susan Delrahim, Lorrie Graham, Julie Hoather, and Annerys Cano, our amazing business manager, who keep everything running with skill, grace, and good humor. And thanks to you, our alumni, for your generous support. We are so grateful.

Sincerely,

Kevin Boyle