By Ruben Flores, Associate Professor of History and Department Chair
It gives me great pleasure to welcome you to a new year at the University of Rochester Department of History. This marks my first semester as chair, and I welcome the opportunity to help guide a remarkable group of professors and students. We look forward to meeting our first-year students in seminars and lectures, too, and working with concentrators in the department who will embark on independent work for the first time or complete research projects in the spring.
Two visiting assistant professors are new to the department this year. Nicholas Bloom (PhD, Texas) specializes in the history of African-American thought and culture, while Michael Hayata (PhD, Wisconsin) focuses on the histories of Japan and China. We are fortunate to have the expertise of these new scholars to support our undergraduate and graduate students alike.
Meanwhile, two associate professors have now earned tenure in the department. Tom Fleischman has earned tenure on the strength of a remarkable book that looks on pig-production in the former East Germany to detail the economic and environmental history of Soviet-era communist society. And Brianna Theobald has earned tenure for her remarkable work on gender and Indigenous history, including a fascinating book that analyzes reproductive practices and politics on the Crow reservation in Montana since the late nineteenth century. Congratulations to them all.
Let me also add a note of gratitude to professor and former chair Laura Smoller, who guided the department through the most difficult moment in our recent history. No one knew how COVID would affect our learning environments. But as COVID’s effects became more clear, Laura was forced to adapt to the initial fears of deans and students alike, the addition of new technologies and remote learning platforms into our lecture halls, and the loss of in-person conferences and lectures that are central to our work. Throughout, Laura kept the department steady and productive, the results of which included three new tenured professors and a series of major awards to our graduate students and faculty. We celebrate Professor Smoller, and wish her well as she researches her next book with the support of a prestigious year-long fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Thank you, Laura.