The Department of History prides itself on its connections with the broader world. After two years of pandemic-related travel restrictions, it welcomed new friends from abroad and saw faculty and students go abroad on prestigious grants.
Keene-Flint welcomed two international guests in 2022-23, Wawrzyniec Kowalski and Irina Makhalova. Kowalski is a specialist in medieval European history who teaches at the University of Wrocław in Poland. He received a university grant to observe the pedagogy of Professor Florin Curta, a leading specialist in the history of national formation in the Middle Ages. Over his three months in Gainesville, he attended Professor Curta’s classes and gave lectures himself about the Teutonic Knights of medieval Livonia, in today’s Baltic region. When he was not in the classroom, he was researching materials at Library West.
Makhalova completed her PhD at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow and came on a six-month Fulbright fellowship at the invitation of Associate Professor Seth Bernstein. During her time at UF, she worked on her book about the German occupation of Crimea during the Second World War. In addition to conducting research, Makhalova spoke with classes in the Department of History, as well as Political Science, Jewish Studies, and Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. Makhalova’s next stop is Berlin, where she will hold a five-year Volkswagen Foundation grant for Societal Transformations.
Beyond campus, both Kowalski and Makhalova enjoyed all that Gainesville has to offer. Makhalova made a habit of seeing the sunset and gators on the Gainesville-Hawthorne Trail. Kowalski saw another breed of Gator at the final home game of the football season at the Swamp. “It was an amazing spectacle,” he said, “almost 90,000 people singing Tom Petty’s ‘I Won’t Back Down’ – amazing.”
