Teaching Philosophy and Research

Introductory history classes should be an invitation for lifelong engagement with history. I believe that an integrated approach to teaching and research is needed for strong history education in higher ed and communicating history to the general public. Scholars need direct contact with their audiences to best understand how to engage them and students are empowered with access to the production of history—rather than only memorizing facts about the past—when active researchers are placed in classrooms. Through reading and learning history, students are entering into millennia-old dialogues about how to reconstruct the past based on surviving and available evidence. Students respond well when they realize that history is not something they have to passively receive, but something they can actively engage in. This takes three forms: literal activities in class—like a Model Continental Congress, using empathy to get students to put themselves in historical situations, and exposing them explicitly to basic historiographical concepts to understand that history is dynamic rather than settled. Activities are an important supplement to lectures and reading. We have immersion days for Egypt and Rome in World History I, where we dive into their culture, literature, and languages. Since most of the primary source evidence in ancient history is archeological, we work with material culture in class by examining a broken reproduction of a statue of Isis and try to reassemble it; since all the pieces are not included, students have to interpret what it is supposed to look like. We also play the game Senet and discuss if it is actually possible to play authentic Senet based on reconstructed rules. We write in hieroglyphics, trace English words with an etymological relationship back to their Egyptian originals, and read excerpts of Egyptian literature from a declaration of Hatshepsut to moral instruction and adventure literature. It is vital that students see historical figures as real people like them. To engage empathy, I pose a decision that a historic figure or group had to make to an individual student or a group and we explore it. This can be a general discussion analyzing the circumstances and motivations of Enheduanna in writing the Exaltation of Inanna while we read it as a class, or dividing the students into groups and working out the strategy and counter-strategy to Genghis Khan’s unification of Mongolian factions into a single political power.  It can be a single question like “If you were Catherine de’ Medici, how would you have protected your children?” or “If you were the leader of the Tlaxcaltecas, would you side with the Aztecs or the Spanish?” Far from being too advanced, basic historiographical concepts excite my students rather than bore them. This amounts to things as simple as saying that “history does not equal the past,” and that “historiography is the history of history,” then reinforcing it with anecdotes and activities over the semester. Students respond to history when they understand what history actually is and that it is something that they can actively participate in rather than passively receive. Understanding history informs and strengthens students’ agency as citizens.

In my research I deconstruct classics into a world history framework while exploring culture, identity, and power in the Ancient Mediterranean; I document the history of and advocate for the historical significance of Marshall, Texas; and I try to demystify historiography for introductory history students and the general public. Most of my research energy is currently going into several chapters of a book proposal about the role of history in worldbuilding for video games derived from a paper I presented at the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association’s 2020 conference. While teaching I developed the core for a World History textbook—for use in introductory courses in colleges and honors courses in high schools—that I would like to develop into an Open Education Resource for schools with limited resources. My history of Marshall, Texas—tentatively titled Throughout Eternity: The Marshallites and the Making of the Modern World—is in the writing and research phase focused on Marshall’s prehistory, the Caddo, settlement, Civil War, Reconstruction, with an outlying focus on its “Refounding Mothers” as a potential journal article. The book will be available when it is finished providing I don’t die first.

 

A screenshot of the first module I built for the first online course that I taught.

A screenshot of the first module I built for the first online course that I taught.

Works by my Academic Mentors