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. 

After the pandemic lockdown and the 2021-22  hybrid year we are back with our usual roster of events held on campus. Have a look at our upcoming events. This October a lecture on ice cream and a festive lunch (with ice cream cake!) will allow us to belatedly celebrate the Center's 15th anniversary. 

Our Center associates—Chabraja Postdoctoral Fellows and the graduate  T.H. Breen Fellows and Quinn Fellow—will teach History courses, conduct archival and digital research, and convene a conference. As usual we have a high number of 23 undergraduate Leopold Fellows, working with 12 History faculty on projects pertaining to the professors' research.  This August and September Leopold Fellows travelled to  the National Archives, to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and to Stanford University to conduct research for their faculty sponsors.  

The Center not only fosters academic excellence, but also an interest in public history and historians' work outside the academy. Our 2022-23 Center associates include two Chabraja Postdoctoral Fellows in Public Service and this summer we funded five 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 Library/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 (graduate student one-day conferences with an invited eminent historian as a keynote speaker)
• global exchanges for graduate students, usually involving participation in a symposium or workshop organized by the host institution, at locations both outside the USA and on the Evanston campus, jointly sponsored with foreign institutions of higher learning (suspended 2020-2022 due to the pandemic)
• other events, such as an ongoing History Department faculty work-in-progress workshop series; 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. The Center has been a major sponsor of the Northwestern Classicizing Chicago Project.

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 young historians to engage in public history at a non-profit institution, preferably in the Chicago area.

Graduate Students:

The CHS has much to offer graduate students in History. Each year the Center selects three T.H. Breen Graduate Fellows. The fellowships are named after the Center's founding director, eminent colonial American historian, Timothy Hall Breen. Two of the Breen Fellows organize one-day faculty and graduate student conferences on a significant historical topic pertinent to their research, with an eminent keynote speaker from outside NU, while the third is in charge of digital media/online initiatives of the Center. 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 is due to resume 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.  This year Professor Ken Alder and grad Colin Bos are designing a Spring 2023 course on "The History of the Future."