NICHOLAS D. CHABRAJA CENTER FOR HISTORICAL STUDIES

About the Center

Center activities are enabled by a generous endowment from Northwestern alum and member of the university's board of trustees Nick CHABRAJA and his wife Eleanor. 

 In October 2022 we belatedly (due to the pandemic) celebrated the Center's 15th anniversary with a festive lunch and Prof. Henry Binford's lecture on the historical importance of ice cream (and yes, there was ice cream cake!). We are continuing an annual "Ice Cream Lecture" at the start of the academic year, at which a Northwestern historian gives a lecture on a broad topic of public interest. Have a look at our upcoming events.

Our Center associates—Chabraja Postdoctoral Fellows and the graduate  T.H. Breen Fellows and Quinn Fellow—teach History courses, conduct archival and digital research, and help organize conferences and workshops.  We had a phenomenal  number of applicants for the undergraduate Leopold Fellowship (over 80!) and have thirty-nine 2023-24 Leopold Fellows working with History faculty on projects pertaining to the professors' research. 

The Center not only fosters academic excellence, but also an interest in public history and historians' work outside the academy. Our 2023-24 Center associates include three Chabraja Postdoctoral Fellows in Public Service and in the summer of 2023 we funded fourteen graduate students working on a slew of public history projects.

Each academic year CCHS hosts:

• four to five public lunch lectures featuring distinguished and emerging scholars
• four jointly organized major public lectures: NU Libraries/CCHS lecture on the History of the Book, a lecture in collaboration with the university's Holocaust Educational Foundation (HEFNU), a distinguished speaker lecture with the Center for African American History (CAAH), and the Gray Boyce Memorial Lecture in Medieval History (in collaboration with the History Department)
• public conferences
• global exchanges for graduate students with Queen Mary University of London
• an ongoing History Department faculty work-in-progress workshop series
• other events, such as annual receptions celebrating new books published by Northwestern historians; public lectures by eminent and emerging historians; public panel discussions on the role of history today; and lectures especially designed to help graduate students deal with professional challenges.

CCHS also co-sponsors additional history activities on campus—see Co-sponsored Events. 

A number of interviews, recorded events, and podcasts are available at  Multimedia.

PostDoctoral Fellows:

The Center community is now strengthened by the Chabraja Postdoctoral Fellows competitively selected from among recent NU History PhDs. Two Chabraja Fellows teach courses in the History Department and participate in CCHS activities. In 2018-19 the first Chabraja Postdoctoral Fellowship in Public Service was established, allowing new historians to engage in public history at a non-profit institution, preferably in the Chicago area. In 2023-24 we have three Chabraja Postdoctoral Fellows in Public Service.

Graduate Students:

The CHS has much to offer graduate students in History. Each year the Center selects 2-3 T.H. Breen Graduate Fellows. The fellowships are named after the Center's founding director, eminent colonial American historian, Timothy Hall Breen. The Quinn Fellow joins Center associates under joint CCHS and Doris G. Quinn Foundation auspices.

An innovative program of global exchanges (international doctoral workshops) was initiated by the Center in 2008-2009 with events in Ireland and Germany, while in 2015 a graduate student exchange was started with the School of History at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) and with the History Department of the University of Hong Kong (HKU). These were suspended due to the pandemic, but the partenership with QMUL resumed in Spring 2023.

In association with Chicago and Evanston institutions, the Center sponsors graduate summer research projects (see Graduate Fellowships).

Undergraduate Students:

For undergraduates (both History majors and across the university) the CCHS Leopold Fellowship program offers the opportunity and means to work closely with primary historical materials under the guidance of faculty, doing actual archival faculty research and learning how to transform raw data into historical interpretation. The first group of ten undergraduate Leopold Fellows started work in 2008-2009. This has proved to be a very popular program among undergraduates.

In 2018 the Center initiated a new undergraduate course development grant for senior History faculty to create new classes aimed at non-History majors. The first course was taught by Professor Scott Sowerby and graduate student Youjia Li on "Pirates, Guns and Empire" in the Spring 2019 quarter, while in 2020 Professor Dyan Elliott offered a prescient Winter Quarter course on "The Black Death and Other Pandemics" with Marcos Leitao De Almeida. In 2020-21 Prof. Paul Gillingham and  Andrea Rosengarten designed a new  Winter 2021 course on "The End of Citizenship" and Spring 2022 brought a course on  “A Global History of Prisons and Camps,” designed by Prof. Benjamin Frommer and Katya Maslakowski, while in 2022-23 Professor Ken Alder and grad Colin Bos designed a Spring 2023 course on "The History of the Future."  In 2023-24 the program features two historians offering new classes: Prof. Deborah Cohen will teach a class on "Entrepreneurship: A Global History" in the Fall  Quarter, while Prof. Michael Allen plans to conduct a course on "America's Wars" in the Spring.