Cliopatria Welcomes Harvard Doctors ...

For my first teaching position, I benefitted from the prejudices of a department chairman who opposed hiring females, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, African Americans, foreigners, radicals, gays, and people with Ivy League doctorates. His reasoning for that last exclusion was that Ivy League job hunters had scorned our reasonably good liberal arts college when it was a sellers market and he'd be damned if he'd hire one of them when the market was glutted with young historians. His prejudices helped to narrow the choice to my meritorious self. At Cliopatria, we welcome historians who have been discriminated against, including Harvard doctors. Jon Dresner and KC Johnson have been with us for a long time and KC will return to Harvard as a visiting professor next semester. We welcomed Rob MacDougall earlier and are pleased to welcome Jeff Vanke, now.

Jeff Vanke is a native North Carolinian with the good sense to attend Duke University. Like me, he has loyalties both to Duke's Blue Devils and to UNC's Tarheels, a commitment since childhood. Jeff went to Harvard for graduate study in European history and did his dissertation on"Europeanism and the European Union, 1954-1966" (1999). We first crossed paths in 1998, when Jeff and I helped to organize The Historical Society. Subsequently, he became its Secretary/Treasurer, serves on its Board of Governors, and briefly was its blogmaster at Historacle. After Harvard, Jeff taught at Guilford College in Greensboro for five years. He left Guilford to spend less time commuting and more time with a growing family (two-year-old son and a daughter due in March). He now adjuncts half-time at Kaplan University. Jeff is working on turning his dissertation into a book and completing a historical spy novel. His spare time goes into local political activism, such as saving Raleigh-Durham Airport. We're happy to have Jeff at Cliopatria.