The History Department celebrates recipients of the 2021 William J. Rorabaugh Departmental Service Award

Submitted by Xiaoshun Zeng on

The Department of History ad-hoc remote learning team--Eric Johnson, Kristin Roberts, Tracy Maschman Morrissey, and Alexandra DuSablon--received the 2021 William J. Rorabaugh Departmental Service Award in recognition of their outstanding service to the History community since the Covid-19 pandemic started. The Rorabaugh Departmental Service Award Selection Committee comprises Joshua Apfel, James Gregory, and Glennys Young.

In her nomination letter for the award, Department Chair Glennys Young highlights the incredible teamwork of the recipients and their tremendous efforts to help history students, faculty, and staff in the challenging year of 2020-2021:


I would like to nominate our ad-hoc remote learning team: Eric Johnson, Kristin Roberts, Tracy Maschman Morrissey, and Alexandra DuSablon for the William J. Rorabaugh Departmental Service Award.

From the beginning of our shift to a remote environment, these four have gone above and beyond in helping students, faculty, and staff successfully meet the learning/teaching goals of our department. They all have learned new skills, hardware, and software quickly and have shown unbelievable patience, problem solving, and more on a daily basis.

Examples: Kristin is our Fiscal Specialist but volunteered to be the initial contact for tech/remote learning questions and problems. She quickly learned how to resolve many of these issues. Eric learned new software and displayed his trademark patience and problem solving of getting folks up and running quickly and successfully; we are incredibly lucky to have him leading our technology team. Tracy worked with our faculty and students to transition a ton of classroom-based classes to the remote environment and dealt with and cut through new bureaucracy that was thrown up, all while maintaining History’s trademark high level of student support. Alexandra took the lead on transitioning our multitude of events to a virtual setting, becoming the expert on Zoom webinars and providing support to faculty, visitors, and guest lecturers, just to name a few.

How they and all the staff came together and demonstrated textbook teamwork is a credit to all of them, especially in a workplace where we were used to working physically close to each other. They are all super deserving of this award, and based on having worked with Bill in the past, I know that Bill would have appreciated all of the help they have provided the department.

Glennys Young
Chair, Department of History
Professor of International Studies
University of Washington
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