Greetings, lovers of
history. MML, HI, here. We all know I love history and hold certain
views regarding history. This young blog ain’t (LOL!) and shouldn’t be about
me. Therefore, I have interviewed
numerous people and asked them to lend their voices for history’s advocacy. I
now ask you, fellow lovers of history, lend me your ears.
Lend your ears to the various voices of history!
And now, the first of many character profiles…
Of
Polish descent and Texas blood, Dr. Peter Kuryla, an assistant professor of
history here at Belmont University, is one multi-ethic individual. He “was born in Austin, Texas, and, after [living]
in Germany [where presumably his U.S. Air Force father was stationed], grew up
in central Illinois and. […] Texas.”
Kuryla earned both his undergraduate and master’s degrees at Midwestern State
University in Wichita Falls, Texas, (my mom’s hometown! Yeah!) and his
doctorate at Vanderbilt University. A
veteran sensei, he
has “been teaching around thirteen or fourteen years if you count my work as a
teaching assistant and my own classes for about nine years or so.”
Kuryla
can’t remember exactly when he first arrived at Belmont; however, he guesses
the year 2007 when he was “fresh out of graduate school as an adjunct. (I
walked the podium at Vanderbilt [in]
spring of 2007 but successfully defended in December ‘06.) I was on the job
market then, and I had taught history for hire and even some political science
all over Nashville, basically out of my car. I found out from a good friend of
mine (a grad school friend) that Belmont needed someone to teach 20th century U.S. stuff. I taught a few things here
and there part time. I left after that for a little while to teach at Vandy and
then I came back full time in fall 2008”
(same time when I, MML, HI, first enrolled at Belmont).
The focus or avenue of history that intrigues
and fascinates Kuryla the most is intellectual history. He said, “While I don’t
run home and read [Martin] Heidegger every evening, I do try to live for and
with ideas. I don’t want there to be too decisive a break between my
impressions of the world at work and at home. Cultural historical approaches
can be fascinating too, provided that they’re well written. I like to see
historians take risks, and cultural historians take risks.”
Kuryla “was always into reading, which fits. Historians like to read,
right? I suppose I’ve always liked
history in some way, but I’ve been more into philosophy and literature and
different points in my life. That said, every time I’ve ventured out into those
areas more intentionally (presenting at a literature or a philosophy conference
for example) I realize more than ever that my home is in history. It’s
comfortable.”
The following is an interview of sorts between me, HI,
and Dr. Kuryla. I will list first my questions and then Kuryla’s awesome
answers.
ME:
Why history? What first got you
interested?
KURYLA: History seems to have the widest potential.
The study of it can encompass pretty much any aspect of human activity, so it
gives me an excuse not to specialize all that much. I like philosophy, theory,
and literature—history is a big enough tent to let all of that stuff in. I
first got interested in history in junior high school. I had a great teacher
named Bob Robertson who piqued my interest (Yes, Robert Robertson) at St.
Malachy’s Catholic School in Rantoul, Illinois. I recall trying to imagine
myself in the early 19th century on
Robert Fulton’s steamboats. For some reason the transportation revolution of
that period sticks in my mind, probably because I had read Huck Finn and
Tom Sawyer. (My aunt Mary, who was also my godmother, gave me a set of
classics in American literature as a gift around that age—[Nathaniel] Hawthorne,
[James Fennimore] Cooper, [Mark] Twain, stuff middle school boys would like.)
When I finally did settle in for undergraduate work after a couple of years
kicking around, history seemed to be a way to follow a passion rather than
pursue something for usual crude utilitarian reasons that one hears: make lots
of money, etc.
ME:
What role does history play in education?
KURYLA:
History is central in any good education. Because the matrix of institutions
and forms of life that we work in and live with (our being-in-the-world so to
speak) bear the imprint of those who came before us, it’s critical to study
history so that we might find good and decent ways to live and die. History
gives us an ironic perspective because if we study it closely enough, we
recognize that it instills in us a critical stance removed from those in the
past, which gives us the capacity to judge historical events. Yet, as we look
even closer we find that we are at the same time inescapably bound to that past
and implicated in a history yet to be, which should humble our ambitions to
judge in the first place. It’s both an absurd enterprise and an awesome
responsibility, which is how life often is. A critical historical consciousness
can give us some pretty powerful tools for living in a complex world. It allows
us to find a balance between playfulness and piety, as Richard Hofstadter (one
of my favorite historians) once put it.
ME:
Do you feel history gets enough attention or focus in all levels of school?
KURYLA:
I don’t think it gets enough attention at Belmont. One can take an entire
degree at this institution and hardly encounter the systematic study of
history. As far as other levels, my knowledge there is limited. I know there
are standards at middle and high schools, and I know that teachers labor under
those standards. My concern there would be the commonplace one: the usefulness
and even wonder of history gets lost when students and teachers become the
creatures of standardized testing bureaucracies. So while I do know that
history is being taught in middle and high schools, I wonder about how it’s
being taught and what is deemed important. I suppose I’m concerned with the
sort of attention history gets before students show up in my classes.
ME: Where is the gap in the average person’s
historical knowledge the widest? Where is it the narrowest?
KURYLA:
I assume this refers to the gap between what historians tend to know and what
the general public (whatever that is) tends to know. (There’s a good book on
the notion of the “average person” as an idea in the United States, by the way:
Sarah Igo’s The Averaged American. She teaches at Vanderbilt and
lectured here last year.) In my experience anyway, the average person’s historical
knowledge doesn’t involve what historians do. I’ve had people ask me, quite
seriously, why I do history given that all of it has already happened. I
suspect many people believe that history is a fixed body of knowledge that
historians acquire and then deliver, rather like the popular version of what
medieval clergy did by bringing the gospel to the illiterate masses. Aside from
that, I would say most people have very little knowledge about societies
outside of the United States and Europe, the sort of thing that drives someone
like my colleague Dan Schafer absolutely nuts.
ME: In your opinion, what role does writing play
in history and other disciplines?
KURYLA:
Writing is the medium through which historians express themselves, so I would
qualify this a little by thinking the role that good writing plays in
history and other disciplines. Historians publish more than ever, and many of
those books and articles aren’t well written. In graduate school for example, I
don’t recall intentional efforts to talk about style in history unless it came
up as a part of another conversation about content. I would love to have read
and unpacked a book like Peter Gay’s Style in History (a really good
book about the writing of some classic historical stylists) but we never got
around to that sort of thing. I wish we would institutionalize style as a part
of history curriculum. My favorite historians and philosophers are good
writers. I wish a few more historians thought the same way. I think other
disciplines do a better job, but not always. I’ve read some clunky articles in
literature and philosophy journals. Of course, there’s a prevailing view among
some that good writing is a kind of sleight of hand that deceives the reader
(the crude, pejorative sense of rhetoric), but I don’t think so. In my weaker
moments, I sometimes wonder whether I prefer good writing to thorough source
work and argumentation.
ME: What motivated you to tutor students
in the writing center?
KURYLA: Great, unexpected question: As a
practical matter, I was working in the English department at Vanderbilt at the
time teaching some writing courses, and I wanted to stay connected with Belmont
in whatever way I could. I’m also committed to the idea of historians as
writers, which should be obvious to people but for whatever reason tends to be
overlooked (not my commitment but the idea). There were conceptual reasons too.
In grad school, I really got into Hayden White’s work (he’s a historian who
does theory, best known for a book called Metahistory) so I became
enamored with the idea of the form of a historical narrative, and that interest
flowed naturally into an interest in writing. Writing has never come all that
easy for me, so helping others with it helped me out quite a lot.
ME:
Who is your favorite American intellectual? Why, how, and where do you see his
or her historic relevance and importance?
KURYLA:
This changes from time to time, depending upon whom I’m reading, but there has
been one constant: the philosopher and psychologist William James, who lived
from 1842 to 1910. He was also the older brother of the novelist Henry James.
There’s an old saw [old saying] about how William James wrote philosophy like a
novelist, and Henry James wrote novels like a philosopher. I don’t know that
this accurately describes Henry James; it doesn’t in my experience, but it
works for William. I wrote my Master’s
thesis on him, have an article about him coming out next year and probably will
write about him in the future. I tend to disagree with him on some things, but
his writing is so wonderful: funny, poetic, rich with metaphor, sometimes dark,
disarmingly personal in its way. James is relevant because he tried things out
and sometimes he failed. He was confused at times, but that didn’t stop him
from thinking. I admire his agnosticism, his inability to shut off live
options, his acknowledgment of despair and his refusal to give in to it
entirely. James is important because he changed the way we use language and
think about philosophy, at least for a while. I read a book a couple of years
ago about James and the broader philosophical movement (called Pragmatism) of
which he was a part. The author described the ability of thinkers to make more
space in what she called “the room of the idea.” That is, a good thinker makes
us think about ideas in ways that we hadn’t before and in ways that stretch the
meaning of words. I don’t think we’ll ever think about words like “truth” or
“belief” or “value” in the same way after James, and I don’t think any American
philosopher since has had the same gift for metaphor. Stanley Cavell writes
lovely philosophical prose, and so did Richard Rorty, but neither is as good as
James.
ME: Is there a person you admire or
model yourself after?
KURYLA:
I admire lots of people, but I tend to resist modeling myself after anyone. One
can only fall short there. I admire lots of dead people: William and Henry
James, Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Ludwig Wittgenstein, W.E.B. Du Bois,
Charles Ives. I admire my father in the way that people tend to. His
experiences are really interesting to me, particularly his growing up in a
family with two parents who were Polish immigrants. I admire my grad school
mentors, particularly Richard H. King, who I think is an incredibly generous
guy with a really searching intellect. My wife Kathy comes to mind too, in that
she is enormously patient and keeps me grounded and not so serious.
ME: What book of historical nature would
you recommend that everyone read?
KURYLA: That’s a tough one. I would
probably choose some fiction; Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man comes to
mind. While the novel falls a bit flat at the end, it really is stunning for
the first half or more. I’ve used it as a textbook in my African American
history course because it’s a tour de force of black history and U.S. history
more broadly. It’s such an exceedingly complex piece of writing about the
legacies of slavery, the notion of the “folk,” the idea of class conflict, the
nature of American identity, ideas of historical time and consciousness.
ME: What book of historical nature would
you recommend that any president should read?
KURYLA:
I really don’t know how to answer this question. Everybody should read Moby
Dick by Herman Melville. I think the president should read it too and then
make all of his staffers read it. There should be a Tuesday reading group on Moby
Dick in the White House.
ME:
What do you read for pleasure?
KURYLA:
I like to read fiction. I keep a copy of Moby Dick on my night stand and
read it again every so often. Melville makes me happy. I read lots of recent
American fiction: Philip Roth, Marianne Robinson, Richard Powers, Don Delillo,
that sort of thing. I read biographies for fun sometimes too, Robert Caro on
Lyndon Johnson, the composer John Adams’ autobiography to name a couple of
recent ones. I also keep up with magazines like The New Yorker and The
New York Review of Books. I read and only very rarely contribute comments
to a blog called USIH (United States Intellectual History).
ME: Do you bring history home with you?
KURYLA:
In the sense that history refers to an attitude or approach to things, I do
bring it home. I don’t bring it home in the sense that I replay my teaching or
research with my wife, who might lose her mind if I did. (She does read my
stuff occasionally.) Given that I study culture and ideas, it’s inevitable that
my thinking about historical things bleeds into my observations about the world
as I encounter it at home. I was at dinner party last night, for example, where
we talked about the differences and similarities between complexly plotted 19th century novels that appeared in serial format
(Dickens especially) and television shows like The Wire. I was curious
about whether twenty-first century readers have a more sophisticated mental
world in some ways because of their ability to absorb so much complex narrative
in so short and brief a medium comparatively speaking. I guess what I mean to
say is that history comes up in my conversations with friends all of the time.
ME: Does your family share your passion
for history or teaching?
KURYLA: Both my parents are teachers,
now retired. My dad taught jet engines for the Air Force, in active duty and as
a civil servant. My mom [was a] middle school teacher [at] Catholic Schools for
years and then worked as a grade school principal. I still talk about teaching
with both of my parents, particularly my mom, who is especially passionate
about teaching.
ME: Do you find time to be an active
historian? If so, how?
KURYLA: I publish my work as often as I
can and stay current in my field, which I suppose means that I’m active. Up to
now, I’ve published articles and book chapters primarily, around one or two a
year, and I have a couple of book projects in the works, one nearing completion
and another in the early stages. I find the time because I think I have some
relevant things to contribute to the field. It’s not always easy with my
obligations at Belmont, but it’s a necessity because I’m a better teacher for
it. It keeps me sharp and definitely influences my teaching, makes me restless.
I always assign new things for that reason. I do most of my work during the
summer, so finding time then isn’t so hard.
ME: What is the most important thing
students leave your courses with?
KURYLA: In general education courses at
least, I hope students leave a little messed up. I don’t try to be iconoclastic
for the sake of it, but I do think students need to think a little more
carefully about things like mortality or naïve consumerism. I’d like the non-majors in those courses to leave
with a more sophisticated sense of the world around them. In upper level
courses, I try (not always successfully) to model a way of exchanging ideas. I
want students to live for ideas and with ideas. I select books carefully in all
of my classes because I think if students leave with anything, it would be
great for them to have the experience of reading something difficult and really
making an effort to understand it.
Thanks a million for reading, fellow
history lovers. Stay tuned!
MML, HI
