Todd Gernes
How does Todd Gernes make history fresh? By getting you to "do" history, by passing on the sleuthing skills (both cutting-edge and time-tested) that keep historians up at night. That means connecting you to animated history and to the lives of the people who have come before you. Professor Gernes’ class gets you to interact with history and fellow students in the most forward-thinking of ways.
Forget textbooks. Imagine you, an Emerson undergraduate, being the first person in a century to lay eyes upon a 19th-century woman's diary. It could happen on one of the frequent class trips to the Historical Documents section of the Boston Public Library. "Historians all over the country would kill to have access to the primary resources we have in Boston," he says.
Forget yawning lectures. Think being engaged in conversation. Think active class "intellectual journals" (blogs) and field trips to the Cambridge sites where Longfellow lived and was laid to rest. Think literature ("The Dante Club"). Think multimedia final projects that bring the long-forgotten to life with video and narrative.
When you practice history yourself, Professor Gernes believes, you develop a conceptual understanding of the subject and build a critical vocabulary that can apply to historical texts, primary documents (like the century-old diary), images, and literature (whether it be set in or actually written in the past). By learning to see with the eyes of an historian, you are better at ferreting out clues, following leads, and uncovering connections.
Assembling the disparate pieces of lives into a comprehensible whole comes so naturally to Professor Gernes that he doubles as director of the New Pathways Program, which focuses on making your first-year transition (from academics to housing to community) as smooth and integrated as possible.
With Professor Gernes as a guide, who knows how seeing with the eyes of an historian will affect your writing or filmmaking or acting?
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