The Modern History and Literature program sponsored a series of graduate student conferences, where students selected the papers and organized events, and faculty played a purely advisory role. Conference themes included Revenge, Vengeance and Divine Retribution (1996), Utopia (1997), Eugenics (1999), Book History (2000), and the revolutionary year 1968 (2006). The History and Culture program plans to continue that tradition.
History and Culture will also sponsor a Research Colloquium where Drew faculty, Drew graduate students, and faculty from other universities present works-in-progress for general discussion and criticism. We work closely with The United Methodist Archives, an invaluable resource for history students, located on Drew’s campus. We collaborate with other research institutions at Drew, such as The Center on Religion, Culture and Conflict. And we are affiliated with centers based at other universities in the region, such as The Center for the Study of Books and Media at Princeton University. For conferences and colloquia, Drew University can use as a venue the Williams Club in midtown Manhattan.
Another distinctive feature of the History and Culture program is the Symposium in Experimental History, an annual one-day conference where outside scholars would present innovative approaches to historical studies. Given that cutting-edge approaches to history have often involved borrowing from other disciplines, the Symposium often invites nonhistorians to explain methodologies that might prove useful to historians. History and Culture has also created a new kind of course called the History Laboratory, where an instructor working on a new historiographic frontier introduces his/her research and methods to students.
