Interview with Cheryl Koos, Ph. D.
When and how did you decide you wanted to be a
historian?
History was one of my first loves. As a child, I devoured biographies
about famous men and women. Much of my initial appreciation of history
probably
came from my father who would talk with me about politics and current
events. He always said that if he hadn't been an engineer, he would have
been a history teacher.
As a sophomore in college, I was searching for a major and loved the Modern
European class I took. It was on the period
between World War I and World War II, the same historical period as the
class I will be teaching this fall. At that time, I decided to be a
history major and pursue law. However, my
mentor strongly encouraged me to think about graduate school. After
being a
teaching assistant for a history class and going on a European study
tour, I knew that teaching European history at the college/university
level was what I wanted to do. I wanted to share my enthusiasm for
history with students and show them that history was meaningful to their
lives.
Why should students in other disciplines be
interested in history?
Crucial to any discipline is knowing where we've come from to
understand where were going. That is what history shows us and every
student can benefit from an appreciation and understanding of the past.
Without the sense of context, we operate in a vacuum.
What kinds of questions are you interested in and
how do you go about answering them as a historian?
In my research, I am interested in the way men and women relate to each
other in society and how definitions of what it means to be a man and
what it means
to be a woman are culturally constructed and
change over time and how they affect the daily lives of real people like
us. These definitions of masculinity and
femininity are not fixed and not biological imperatives, but are socially
constructed by language, politics, religion, culture and many other
factors. Through the historical process, we can see how these
definitions are constructed and how they change over time. For example,
World War I drastically changed how men
and women related to each other in Europe. While men were on the front
lines fighting in trenches, women on the home front worked in the jobs
soldiers had left. As a result, many women experienced
greater financial and cultural independence. When the men came home
after the war, they found women increasingly in the public sphere; the
postwar world looked very different than the one they had left. Many
things, including gender relations, had drastically changed in four
years. In my dissertation, I describe how the political system in
France between World War I and World War II, particularly that of the
right wing, employed a certain view of what it meant to be a man and a
woman and how these definitions influenced how these men structured their
political system and developed an authoritarian government during World
War II.
What are some current projects you are working on?
My latest research project is turning my dissertation into a book length
manuscript. For this research, I was in France this summer studying in
the French National Library, the National Archives, as well as some smaller
Parisian archives. I published an article for French Historical Studies
last spring and am currently expanding upon some of the ideas I began
developing in my dissertation. The article I am presently working on
comes from a chapter
from my dissertation. I presented a paper at the Society for French
Historical Studies in Boston last spring, and have another paper under
review for a French history conference Birmingham, England next March.
The end result of these
conference presentations will be an article which shows how traditional
constructions of
masculinity and femininity contributed to the development of fascism in
France during the interwar period.
How important is research to a university?
To keep teaching fresh and exciting is our first mission as professors,
and research influences how that comes about. This is why it is so
important for all academics to be contributing to current
scholarship in their respective fields of study. Research and teaching
are intricately linked and not mutually exclusive activities. In fact,
it is research that distinguishes a university like La Sierra from
four-year colleges and makes it a more dynamic place of learning and
inquiry for the entire academic community, professors and students
alike.
Another exciting aspect of research is when we include interested
students insome of our projects. The students have an opportunity to
discover what it is like to be an active participant in the research
process and to develop their skills of analysis and critical thinking.
~Interviewer: Traci Winters
More about Cheryl Koos.
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