Chair’s letter, Aug. 2023
A recent article in The New Yorker ominously titled “The End of the English Major” offers a kind of eulogy for the humanities, noting that enrollments have been in “free fall” nationwide for more than a decade, leading to the shrinking or elimination of humanities programs at many institutions. The History Department has certainly felt those pressures. As I noted in this space last year, our once-robust figure of 1,000 majors in 2005 had dwindled to around 300 a few years ago, driven lower by economic uncertainty, an increasing preference for STEM degrees by many students, and the combined recent stresses of Covid, remote learning, and student burnout.
I’m happy to say that things are looking up. We’ve managed to reach close to 400 majors once again, and we hope to surpass that number this year. We’ve no doubt benefited from the easing of the pandemic, but our faculty have also vigorously recruited new students. We also benefit from a vibrant, history-advertising social media presence, and we’ve organized well-attended activities such as a World Cup soccer watch party last fall that left standing room only at Pugh Ocora Hall. Students today know that the study of history can help them understand the hyper-politicized world they will inherit.
They’re also realizing that the skills learned in patient research, clear writing, analytical rigor, and logical argumentation can open doors to lots of career pathways. Many majors, for instance, find the history degree ideal preparation for the nation’s top law schools, as we feature in this newsletter. To cite one recent example, Sujaya Rajguru, a 2019 UF graduate and 2022 law graduate from the University of Virginia, published an article called “Fulfilling the Promises of our Preamble” in the prestigious Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, noting in her acknowledgments that her ideas were informed by her “history education at the University of Florida [and] I am appreciative of my professors in the History Department.” Law is just one option, but a history degree, as it opens doors, can open eyes too. On a related note to alumni readers: Please consider letting us know where your History major has taken you in this Alumni Survey.
Our faculty members remain as busy and productive as ever, publishing four books and 30 peer-reviewed articles over the past year and winning several prestigious grants and fellowships. Besides this steady scholarly output, our faculty spend a great deal of time making their research more widely accessible by giving dozens of public talks, writing editorials and op-eds, and working with community groups on history-related projects. We like to think of ourselves as academic ambassadors to the public. We welcome two new faculty to our ranks: Alyssa Cole, assistant professor of U.S. History, whose primary appointment is in African American Studies, and Miles Larmer, Professor of African History and the new director of the Center for African Studies.
Finally, I’d like to share a major development in our fundraising efforts. We are actively working toward the creation of a departmental Bridget Bernadette Phillips Endowed Term Professorship. As many of us know, Bridget Phillips was a talented UF History undergraduate student in the 1980s who had just started a doctoral program in medieval history at Johns Hopkins University when she lost her life tragically. For many years, the History Department has awarded the Bridget Phillips scholarship to talented undergraduate honors students to support international research travel. Over the past year, Tim Dean, a fellow doctoral student at Hopkins and now a literature professor at the University of Illinois, has worked with the Phillips family, UF Advancement, the History department, and generous donors to create another fund in her memory. With several large gifts received, the Bridget Bernadette Phillips Endowed Term Professorship has reached $400,000 of its $500,000 to $1 million target. We’re grateful to Professor Dean for spearheading this effort on the History department’s behalf. In the end, it will help our students, as Bridget Phillips would have wanted.
Sincerely,
Jon Sensbach
Professor & Chair