My Academic Journey: Part 3/3

As I neared completion of my MA, I began the next round of applications to PhD programs. I had a better sense of what I was doing this time around and put together better applications. My preferred destinations remained extremely competitive, however, and of course I was even older than the last time I had applied. Elite institutions tend not to be forgiving in that way, so many of my applications were also denied this time. I did get accepted to William & Mary and thought hard about enrolling there. I was wait-listed at Penn State. But I also had a connection to Southern Illinois University, which houses the papers of John Howard Lawson, the subject of my Master’s thesis. I had visited there on my first ever archival research trip and found the work exhilarating. I got to know a few of the faculty in the History department and they seemed earnest and lively. They also wanted to continue to build out their PhD program. And so I applied. They offered generous funding, and I was not ready to quit academia. I became a Saluki.

Wyoming had given me something else as well that I took with me to Carbondale: the American Studies program enjoyed close relationships with exchange programs in the Netherlands. Dutch students loved to come to Laramie, exchanging the most densely populated country on the planet for what was one of the least. And that is how I met my future Dutch wife.

She would soon enroll at SIU with me to pursue her own studies. In time she would transfer to the University of Michigan and the denser Holocaust studies offerings there. But I was also developing a keener interest in contemporary Dutch history, a topic virtually non-existent in American higher education. You can read about how my scholarly agenda shifted here, but suffice it to say that I was now becoming highly sensitized to the role of contingency--luck, fortune, and happenstance--in the flow of events.

I would take my first teaching job at Grand Valley State in 2001, a Fulbright to the Netherlands in 2003–04, and another teaching job at Central Michigan University a few years after that. By 2008 we were on our way to the University of South Carolina, where I taught for thirteen years, interspersed with a year teaching at the University of Utrecht.

I taught—a LOT: dozens of courses in many different subjects: surveys and upper-level offerings, hoary topics well-traveled, and brand new courses I developed myself. I published quite a bit as well: eight peer-reviewed scholarly articles, three co-edited anthologies, and dozens of lesser pieces. I worked on my book intermittently, which finally appeared earlier this year, though that is a topic that will get a post of its own. I delivered dozens of conference papers at home and abroad. And I gained extensive administrative and management experience as Faculty Principal of an internationally-themed living-learning community. I’ve served on every type of committee the university has to offer, from thesis committees to curricular committees to diversity committees to countless ad hoc committees. There isn’t a better way to get something done, with democratic accountability, than through a committee. There isn’t a better way to bury a politically unpopular initiative either.

It has not been a linear path, and certainly not conventional. My career has been marked more by stubborn determination than brilliance. But I have maintained my love for the study of History. I am certain more than ever that we cannot know ourselves if we do not know our history: personal, family, regional, national, and global, all those histories are interconnected and they have produced each one of us. We all are—you, me, everyone—the sum total of all that has come before, whether we know it or not. Many Americans seem content to remain oblivious to the past which has produced us, even, I think, wholly committed to the maintenance of historical ignorance. Others seem satisfied to distort self-knowledge with the comforting warmth of myth. I think there’s a better way, a more honest path to awareness, understanding, and truth, even if that path requires confronting and acknowledging uncomfortable realities from time to time.

--David J. Snyder