Faculty Interviews

The History Department Core Colloquium (History 501) introduces first-year doctoral students to historiographic issues and methods as well as to the work of faculty and graduate students in the department. In Fall 2017 and Fall 2018, students welcomed several department faculty to the seminar room and interviewed them about their work. Recordings of these interviews are available below.

Jason Halub interviews Professor Aviel Roshwald about his work on the history of comparative nationalism, emphasizing the complex relationship between tradition and modernity as it relates to heritage, political legitimacy, and statehood.
(9/13/2017)
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Debra Mayfield interviews Professor Katherine Benton-Cohen about her work on U.S. immigration policy as it relates to gender, race, and identity, as well as the evolution of the field of immigration history.
(10/18/2017)
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Yuan Gao interviews Professor Carol Benedict about her work on the social meanings and uses of tobacco in China, as well as the relationship between patterns of consumption in late imperial China and in the 20th century.
(11/1/2017)
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Luke Frederick interviews Professors Adam Rothman and David Collins about their work with Georgetown’s Working Group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation​. They also reflect on the wider efforts of universities across the country as they attempt to grapple with their own institutional histories and legacies of slavery.
(11/15/2017)
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Natascha Otoya interviews Professor John McNeill about his work on global environmental history, the trajectory of the field, and the practical challenges of writing history on a global scale.
(11/29/2017)
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Victoria Broadus interviews Professor Anna von der Goltz about her work in 1968 in East and West Germany, highlighting the ways in which oral history can be used as a tool in analyzing political movements.
(12/6/2017)
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Natalie Donnell interviews Professor Ananya Chakravarti about her work in Latin American and South East Asian history, the importance of language training, finding representational balance in the archives, and the process of publication.
(10/17/18)
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Elisha Henry interviews Professor Greg Afinogenov about his project “Spies and Scholars: Clandestine Encounters between Russia, China, and the West.” Listeners also learn more about Professor Afinogenov’s enduring research interests and even discover something new about the history of Georgetown University.
(10/24/18)
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Greg Beaman interviews Prof. Jamie Martin about writing a material history of capitalism and the international order, as well as the interpretive challenges of writing history that bears directly upon the present.
(10/31/18)
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