Discussion Board for Graduate Students

Graduate Students: You now have a voice (actually, two of them!) on the ASEH Executive Committee. We, Bradley Skopyk and Merritt McKinney, are your current Graduate Student Liaisons. We’re sure that many of you will have issues and initiatives that you’d like to see addressed by the ASEH, so please join the discussion board or send us your comments by email (bds134@yorku.ca or mmck5@rice.edu). In particular, we need your help to define the new position of Graduate Student Liaison to the ASEH.

In January 2008 the Executive Committee of the ASEH asked this year’s recipients of ASEH graduate student travel grants if they would like to serve as Graduate Student Liaison on the Executive Committee (as non-voting members). Now, we must formally define this position within the bylaws of the Society. We will draft a proposal by the end of the summer. The Executive Committee prefers that graduate students take the initiative to define this position. To start this process, we’ll outline some of the major questions and issues that need to be addressed.

1. DUTIES: The graduate student liaison will act as a voice for graduate students within the Executive Committee. Should this be narrowly conceived as advancing proposals focused directly on graduate student issues? Or, should the liaison be a voice for students more generally, on issues such as the operation of our journal Environmental History, the Society’s environmental and social responsibilities, the ASEH web presence, or even ASEH finances?
2. VOTING: Should Graduate Student Liaisons be voting members of the Committee? While at first glance this seems straight forward—in that a vote would make the liaison a more meaningful position-— voting rights might require, from a democratic perspective, that the liaison be elected. Presently, all voting members of the ASEH Executive Committee are elected and serve a term of at least 2 years. (You can review the Society’s bylaws at http://www.aseh.net/about-aseh/bylaws) Concordantly, the three appointed ex officio positions (Executive Director, H-Environment Representative, and the Editor of Environmental History) do not vote. Please, give us your opinions.
3. SELECTION: How should the Graduate Student Liaison be selected? Do we need two liaisons, or just one? The liaison must be able to attend the Executive Committee meeting at the annual conference. Currently, there is no money allotted to help the liaison, nor any other voting Executive Committee member, with travel expenses. For this reason it was decided that for the 2008 meeting in Boise, it was easiest to offer the position to travel award recipients. Should this method of selection continue? Please give your opinions.
4. TERM: For how many years should the liaison serve? Terms longer than two years would exclude many graduate students, while a one-year term might be too short. It should also be noted that a term of more than one year would require the liaison to attend multiple annual meetings, putting additional financial stress on the student. Perhaps one solution would be to reserve one of the current ASEH student travel grants for the liaison position. Any thoughts?

Besides hammering out the details of the Graduate Student Liaison(s) to the Executive Committee, we hope that grad students will use this discussion board to offer suggestions on issues that the current (Brad and Merritt) and future liaisons should tackle. Several of you made excellent suggestions to us at the meeting in Boise. Here are a few: 1) Develop some sort of dissertation workshop for graduate students at the annual meeting. One or two faculty members could meet with a small group of graduate students to discuss their dissertations (offer suggestions, criticism, support, etc.). 2) Organize other workshops for graduate students on various topics of interest to us, such as the job hunt, getting published, etc. 3) Hold the graduate student reception at a place where students do not have to clear out after the reception. Perhaps it could be held at a restaurant where free food or drinks would be provided for an hour or so. After that students would be free to stay there (paying their own tab) rather than split up into smaller groups to find a place for dinner.

These are just a few of the ideas that students mentioned to us at the meeting. We welcome your feedback on these ideas as well as any other suggestions you have for improving the ASEH grad student experience. Post away, please!

Bradley and Merritt

Hi Bradley & Merritt,

Thanks for getting this ball rolling! I'll provide my two cents on the topics at hand . . .

First, a general question: Are there any precedents that we could be following so that we’re not reinventing the wheel or making mistakes that other organizations have made? Perhaps there are successful models out there we could emulate?

1. DUTIES: I vote for having the focus of the liaisons be broadly defined to cover as many topics as feasible and in accordance with the organization bylaws, etc.; this will give the liaisons the opportunity to get involved in aspects of the administration of the organization that they’re most interested in.
2. VOTING: I’m of two minds on this one. It seems to me that holding elections for the liaisons might entail a daunting amount of leg work (in the form of getting nominees, having the nominees compose their statements, getting the statements promulgated, etc.). However, having grad students on the board as voting members would enable the grad student voice to be represented more meaningfully. A middle-ground might be to start off without voting rights and reevaluate things at the end of the first year.
3. SELECTION: I think having two liaisons is a good idea--it makes it more likely that one or the other will be available in general and will be able to attend the conference. I like the idea of coupling the travel grants with the liaison positions: such a move would help ensure the liaison’s attendance at the conference; if this coupling becomes the norm, then it must be made clear to the recipients that when they apply they’re also volunteering for the position of liaison. However, if the travel grant recipients become the liaisons, then that means they’re not being voted in, which means they can’t become voting members of the board; this complicates my evaluation of #2 above.
4. TERM: I think a 1-year term would be fine, for the following reasons: it would couple nicely with the travel grants (if that’s the decision); it would provide the grad student with a short and sweet experience of what it’s like to be involved at the board level of a national historical association; it would provide a great opportunity to network with established professionals in the field; and it wouldn’t be too much of a potential burden on grad students who are working hard on their research while also learning how to juggle the rest of the things in life (relationships, social connections, family, finances, etc. etc.) in conjunction with the work of being an academic.

Comments on other suggestions . . .

1) “Develop some sort of dissertation workshop . . .”: I really like this idea, in large part because I suggested it after having a great experience with it at the 2007 SACRPH conference in Portland, ME. It provided a relatively informal--yet focused--way to get to know other grad students and profs.

If this is something that the majority wants to do, I’d be more than happy to volunteer in some capacity to help make it happen.

2) “Organize other workshops for graduate students . . . “: This is a great idea. I would also suggest that these workshops NOT be during the times of the regular sessions: I, for one, would not like to be faced with the decision to choose between hearing a great set of papers OR conferring with my grad student peers. One suggestion might be to have the workshops during a lunch break: that way, it could have the air of an informal-yet-informative session.

To come up with workshop topics, it might work to solicit ideas through H-Environment and then make the final decisions / arrangements with sufficient time to get the information in the conference brochure.

3) “Hold the graduate student reception at a place . . .”: I like this idea also, but it might be easier said than done. It seems to me like it might be less expensive overall to have situations like we did in Boise, where we all went to the museum and had some catered comestibles, as opposed to renting a large room (or an entire venue) for the mingling AND the dinner; I could very well be wrong here, though, because I have no idea how much the Boise museum evening cost.

I suppose another option would be to set things up in one of the rooms of the conference hotel and have food brought in . . . hmm, that sounds expensive also, now that I think about it.

One other possibility might be for the local arrangements committee, in league with the grad liaisons, to scope out an appropriate restaurant for the grad students to retire to, en masse, after mingling at a different place, and make this announcement beforehand so that the grad students are all on the same page and can migrate together.

Well, I guess that was more like 3 or 4 cents . . .

James V. Hillegas Portland State University

Are there any additions/suggestions any other students can make for graduate study options beyond what is listed on the webpage?

Thanks, Alex

I am a doctoral candidate member of ASEH who attended Boise 2008. Currently I am trying to organize a panel along with Jonathan Hunt (University of Texas, Austin) at the 2009 Conference of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), which will be held June 27-29 in Falls Church, Virginia. This link has more info on the conference: http://www.shafr.org/cfp.htm#SHAFR2009

The SHAFR conference is an opportunity to explore, among other things, transnational and environmental history of interest to ASEH members in a diplomatic context.

Jonathan writes that he is interested in organizing “a panel relating to International Diplomacy and the Environment. I am currently working on a project examining perceptions of the effect of nuclear radiation on the transnational environment and its significance to U.S.-Japanese relations from 1954-1960. My paper would stress the importance of globalizing agents in framing and resisting environmental contamination and nuclear proliferation, in particular NGOs such as the U.N., the antinuclear scientific movement, and students groups in Japan.”

My own interest in this prospective panel is in how nuclear fallout constructed perceptions of environmental risk that actively shaped and constrained landscapes of national security. Transnational pressures on policy makers were typically elided in an effort to give them a free hand to plan for use of nuclear weapons, but the circulation of ideas and material culture implicating fallout as a limitation on planning and testing wielded considerably more influence than was acknowledged at the time. My dissertation title is “Nuisance to Nemesis: Nuclear Fallout and Intelligence as Secrets, Problems, and Limitations on the Arms Race, 1954-1964.”

I’d like to pass along a request for a third panel member, as well as potential chair and commentator. Perhaps other ASEH members are interested in joing Jonathan and I on this panel.

Proposals need to be submitted no later than December 1. Please let me know if you can assist us in our search to complete this panel. My email is mlehman@illinois.edu

Mike Lehman