Spring Message from Professor Anand Yang, Department of History Chair.
Four years have flown by quickly. I have very much appreciated chairing the History Department and the unique vantage point that has afforded me to get to know my excellent colleagues—faculty and staff—and students a lot better. I have also enjoyed working with our many community supporters, particularly our History Advisory Board headed by Debbie Galuska and composed of other prominent local leaders. Our quarterly gatherings are always occasions to celebrate the Department’s many achievements and recognize all the people at UW and in the wider community that make our faculty and students so successful in the classroom and in their scholarship.
As the many stories featured in this quarterly update highlight, the History Department is always making news in and around campus. We relish sharing our expertise with others and elucidating the present through an understanding of the past, and we routinely do that in our classes and in the many extraordinary events we organize and sponsor weekly.
As I hand the chair position over to my colleague Professor Glennys Young this summer, I look forward to returning to my research and writing on a full-time basis, something I have not been able to do in the last few years. Fortunately, I managed to send off my new book manuscript on Empire of Convicts to the press, a little later than I had planned to but such is the life of an administrator. I am also excited by the prospect of doing a lot more teaching, interacting with many more undergraduate and graduate students than I have been able to do in recent years. I want to thank History faculty, staff, students, and HAB members who have made my stint at the helm of the Department, to use a cricket metaphor, a good innings.
