Dr. Matthew Mewhinney is an assistant professor of Japanese Language at the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics. He received his BA and MA from University of California, Santa Barbara in 2006 and 2009, respectively. He completed his PhD degree in Japanese Language from University of California, Berkeley in 2018. Dr. Mewhinney joined FSU in 2019.
What is your primary research interest?
Dr. Suzanne Sinke serves as the History Department’s Associate Chair for Graduate Studies. She is a historian of migration and gender studies in the U.S. context. She received her MA from Kent State University in 1983, and her PhD from University of Minnesota, Twin Cities in 1993. She joined FSU in 2002.
How did you know you wanted to do a PhD and become a historian?
I was singularly committed to becoming a teacher of history from childhood. The question was only at which level, and I started my undergraduate studies planning to be a high school teacher.
I have never had any desire whatsoever to be a department head. Yet after fifteen years at the University of North Georgia, that’s where I find myself. Perhaps it was inevitable. There is some truth to the old saying that the department head (DH) you want is the person who does not want the job. Technically, I am the Associate Department Head (ADH), but UNG has five campuses. I supervise two campuses, where I assume all duties of department head except for budgeting. We serve five-year terms and can be re-elected. Most often, the ADH goes on to serve as the DH.
Dr. James Palmer is a late medievalist who works on primarily thirteenth- through fifteenth-century Italy. He received his BA from Michigan State University (MSU) in 2000, MA from Duke University in 2002, and completed his PhD at Washington University in St. Louis in 2015. His dissertation topic was “Gold, Grain, and Grace: Piety and Community in Late Medieval Rome.” Dr. Palmer joined the FSU History Department in 2015.
How did you know you wanted to go to graduate school and become a historian?
Emma Davis, a rising senior, just put together her first solo digital exhibit. Entitled ‘War Girls: California’s Army Nurses in the First World War,’ it is the product of Emma’s internship with the National Cemetery Association (NCA). From September 2020 to April this year, Emma held a Virtual Student Federal Service (VSFS) internship that allowed her to take classes at FSU while interning with the NCA in Washington, D.C.
When I was 18 years old, I knew I wanted to be a history professor. History was my favorite topic in high school, thanks to some enthusiastic and creative teachers. So I went to Central Michigan University and double-majored in English and History for my bachelors, studied British History at Strathclyde in Scotland for my Masters, then took a break. College in the 1990s was such a "sink or swim" place to be, and although I was one of the students who successfully swam, I was a little burned out.
My freshman year, I did not grasp the true value of education. Nor did I know about undergraduate research, Directed Individual Studies, fellowships, and other enriching opportunities. As a first-generation college student, my idea of college was simply attending classes and earning a piece of paper proclaiming that I had graduated. Once I realized how wrong I was, I packed as much as I could into my junior and senior year.
Age of Revolutions (AoR) is an online platform that has been making an impact on the field of revolutionary history. The site is innovative in the realm of academic publishing because it is open-access yet maintains a rigorous peer-review process. In an earlier article (The Making of 'Age of Revolution'), we describe how Bryan Banks and Cindy Ermus, both alumni of FSU History and the Institute on Napoleon and the French Revolution (INFR), created the online platform.
“When I go to a scholarly website, I don’t expect to be surprised, if only because I am often looking for something specific. But when I go to Age of Revolutions I always find something unexpected and unexpectedly helpful for my own teaching or research. The site offers gateways to new thoughts because its editors are always on top of the latest developments and because they have an especially capacious view of what matters in history. They are not just collecting scholarship; they are actively helping to create new interpretations.”
My journey to my doctorate was hard and atypical, but I have always known that this is what I have wanted, and as a goal the achievement of my Ph.D. never ceased to be on my radar. The three things that helped me to finally obtain it at the mature age of fifty-two included the solid foundation I gained from my experience in the military, my background as a K-12 educator, and the professional nurturing and the targeted and specialized support I received from each one of my professors and fellow graduate students in the History department at Florida State University.
