As Chair, I have come to appreciate and value the exceptional work of our talented faculty (30 full-time; 12 part-time), hard-working graduate students (~50), and engaged undergraduate history majors and minors (~260).  We continue to build on the department’s long tradition of distinguished scholarship, which in turn reinforces our best teaching.  Our faculty not only publish widely in books and articles but also bring their knowledge to students in the classroom and to wider audiences through lectures, exhibits, websites, podcasts, video courses, and op-ed pieces.

The Department's talents span the fields of history, but we are especially proud of our role in pioneering the field of Public History over the past four decades.  In 2020, the National Council on Public History (NCPH) gave its Founders Award to the Department, signfiying our leadership in bringing history to broad audiences. 

In recent years, our faculty have won many other awards, ranging from a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship (Dr. Alice Weinreb, 2024), to a Distinguished Fulbright Fellowship (Dr. Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, 2023), to the Albert Feis Award for the American Historical Association for career accomplishments in Public History (Dr. Theodore Karamanski, 2021).  Since 1992, Loyola historians have published more than 75 books, many of which have won significant prizes.  Members of the department have won prestigious fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (9), the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (4), the National Humanities Center (2), the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (3), the American Council of Learned Societies (4), Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and the National Science Foundation.  History faculty have won or been nominated for the Sujack Award for Teaching Excellence and other Loyola teaching prizes more than 15 times. Three members of the department have been named Loyola Faculty Members of the Year or Graduate Faculty Members of the Year (Drs. Gilfoyle, Karamanski, and Mooney-Melvin).  

We do not rest on our laurels. Members of the History Department continue to push boundaries with the history we write and with our leadership on campus.  We take seriously the social justice mission of Loyola, and the powerful events of recent years beg for historical context.  Everything has a history, and the work of historians is needed as much as ever.  Our programs and curriculum provide students and the larger world with the rich historical contexts of global pandemics, structural racism, gender inequality, religious change, and political nationalism, among many topics we explore.  Our faculty have spent their careers thinking critically about these topics in historical perspective.  The History Department at Loyola University Chicago has much to contribute to these conversations – in the classroom, in print, and in national venues – and we look forward to doing so. 

D. Bradford Hunt

Professor and Chair, Department of History