Teaching and Writing History at a Liberal Arts College: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow
Tuesday, June 14
6-7 p.m. Eastern
A Zoom link to join will be included in your registration confirmation email.
Questions? Please email the Office of Alumni Engagement at alumni@kzoo.edu.
New Dr. David Strauss and Dr. John B. Wickstrom Senior Integrated Project Endowed Fund
Alumni, current and retired faculty and staff, and friends of the College have established the Dr. David Strauss and Dr. John B. Wickstrom Senior Integrated Project (SIP) Endowed Fund, to honor Professors Strauss and Wickstrom and the impact they had on history students at K. The award will be made every year to support the SIP of a senior history major.
If you would like to support K history student SIPs and give in honor of Professors Strauss and Wickstrom, please make a gift online to the Dr. David Strauss and Dr. John B. Wickstrom Senior Integrated Project Endowed Fund.
Dr. David Barclay devoted his professional life to researching, writing and teaching European history. As a scholar, he achieved national and international distinction for his work in modern German history. During a 43-year career at Kalamazoo College, he shared his achievements in those fields with several generations of students. David worked tirelessly to expand the influence of the history department at K. Collaborating with colleagues, he wrote a successful proposal for the Center for Western European Studies, a Title VI Undergraduate Resource Center funded by the United States Department of Education. The award establishing the program was the only one made to a liberal arts college and was competitively renewed every three years for fifteen years. David also accompanied students on Study Abroad on several occasions and served as a mentor, adviser and friend to countless alumni.
Dr. David Strauss earned a bachelor’s degree from Amherst College and a master’s degree and doctorate from Columbia University before joining Kalamazoo College in 1974. After training under historian Richard Hofstadter, Strauss opened new perspectives on U.S. history to generations of students throughout his years at K. True to the College’s international vision in both his teaching and research, Strauss emphasized the global, comparative and interdisciplinary dimensions of U.S. history, from anti-Americanism in France to the cultural history of Japanese-American relations and the internationalization of American cuisine in the 20th century. His students learned about the social, cultural and intellectual contexts of U.S. history and many have followed his example by pursuing careers in teaching or public history.
Dr. John Wickstrom earned a bachelor’s degree at Michigan State University and a master’s degree and doctorate from Yale University before joining K in 1966. For more than four decades, K students learned from him about centuries from roughly 700 BCE to 1500 CE. Originally trained in late medieval English legal history, Wickstrom turned increasingly to the study of early medieval monasticism, culminating in pathbreaking research on the sixth-century French monastic, Saint Maurus, including a 2022 book titled Fiction, Memory, and Identity in the Cult of St. Maurus, 830-1270. For many years, Wickstrom took advantage of the Kalamazoo-based International Congress on Medieval Studies, the world’s largest conference of its kind, to introduce students to hands-on historical research and many of the world’s eminent scholars. He also arranged for K students to present papers, usually based on their SIP research, in the undergraduate sessions of the Conference.