CCHS Teaching Initiative
Course Development Fellowship for History Department faculty and graduate students
- In 2022-23 Prof. Ken ALDER and graduate student Colin BOS will develop a Spring 2023 course on "The History of the Future."
- In 2021-22 Prof. Benjamin FROMMER and grad Katya MASLAKOWSKI developed a course on “A Global History of Prisons and Camps” for Spring Quarter 2022. Professor Frommer was promoted to the Associated Student Government Honor Roll for this course.
Tenured associate and full professors are invited to apply for a fellowship that carries a two-course reduction in order to develop a new lecture course, working closely on that course’s crafting and instruction with an advanced graduate student. (The new lecture course will count as one of the two courses the faculty member teaches that year). We fund one fellowship per year, and faculty whose course proposals are not selected can re-apply in subsequent years.
We invite faculty to propose broad-ranging thematic or transnational history courses, preferably at the 200 level, with significant potential appeal to undergraduates across the university. Our first course developed through this initiative was Scott Sowerby’s “Pirates, Guns, and Empires” (Spring 2019, with Youjia Li), while for winter 2020 Dyan Elliot presciently chose the topic of “The Black Death and Other Pandemics” (with Marcos Leitão De Almeida). In 2020-21 Prof. Paul Gillingham and Andrea Rosengarten offered a Winter 2021 course on "The End of Citizenship." Courses with special appeal to students in professional schools, such as histories of journalism, theatre, business, and so on, might be especially relevant. We will only be able to consider single-instructor classes.
Once the course is selected, ABD graduate students are invited to apply to collaborate on its development, and the faculty fellow will then select as their graduate collaborator from among the applicants a student who is not their advisee and preferably not in their immediate field. The course co-development and instruction will cover all of the student’s instructional duties for that year. The graduate student will serve as a junior "co-instructor" entrusted with teaching three sections, grading course assignments, and delivering several lectures.
The course work will cover two subsequent quarters, Fall-Winter or Winter-Spring. In the first quarter, faculty and student meet weekly to develop the syllabus, select course materials, draft lectures, and set up power-point slides. The second quarter is devoted to the course instruction. The graduate student will serve as a junior “co-instructor” entrusted both with sections and with delivering several lectures. The courses will initially be offered under a generic 200 and 300 rubric and subsequently included in the course catalog under a permanent number. Fellowship recipients will commit to teaching the course at least three times in five consecutive years, starting with the fellowship year.
At the beginning of the course we ask for a syllabus and at the end, a short memo detailing the number of students who took the course, how the course unfolded, the role of and evaluation of the graduate co-instructor, and any pertinent conclusions. Please direct questions to Director Amy Stanley at a-stanley@northwestern.edu
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