Graduate Training in the Digital Age: What History Departments Should be Doing

While the past decade has seen revolutionary changes take place in scholarly communications, teaching methods and access to primary research materials, graduate training in history departments across the country has changed very little or not at all. If g raduate students are to be trained to be competitive both on the job market and in their respective fields, graduate programs must integrate these changes into their curricula and professional experiences allowed their students. This roundtable discussion will assess both the state of graduate training in the digital age, and what departments can do to better integrate multimedia and digital teaching and researching into their graduate curricula.

Participants in this roundtable are drawn from a wide range of fields and area studies. Patrick Manning, Professor of History, African-American Studies, and Education at Northeastern University also directs the World History Center at Northeastern Univers ity. This program has pioneered world history training, and is currently one of the only programs in the nation to officially offer a degree in World History. Janice Reiff, Assistant Professor of History at the University of California at Los Angeles has published and taught extensively about digital technologies and the practice of history. Abdul Alkalimat is Professor of Sociology and Director of Africana Studies at the University of Toledo. He has authored two books, and directs numerous projects on th e impact of technologies on society, centering specifically on the experiences of African-Americans. David Franklin Herr is completing his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Herr has accumulated a vast amount of experience with digit al technologies over the course of his graduate work through collaborative projects such as RiverWeb, the interdisciplinary, multimedia exploration of the Mississippi River's interaction with people over time. The roundtable will be chaired by Mark Kornb luh, Associate Professor of American History and Director of MATRIX: The Center for Humane Arts, Letters and Social Sciences Online at Michigan State University and Executive Director, H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online.