What is your favorite class to teach? Why?

I love, love teaching my May Study Abroad course, History 3908.06 “Between France and Morocco: Diversity and Inclusion in the Francophone World.” During this three-week course, we travel to Paris and Marseille in France, then on to Casablanca, Rabat, Fez and Marrakech in Morocco to explore how each of these countries has dealt with a history of racism, colonialism, sexism, and religious and ethnic diversity. The twenty-five students who choose to take this course have always been amazing, many come from OSU’s own diverse populations and for most of them it is their first trip to Africa as well as Europe. We learn so much about each other as well as from our guest lecturers and hosts, discovering both how a modern Muslim society (Morocco) and a postcolonial multiracial society (France) are dealing with the thorny issues today of immigration and rising intolerance and xenophobia. The topic can be difficult, but there is so much joy too in making connections across cultures and borders. Covid has temporarily put most Study Abroads on ice, but I am optimistic that 2022 will allow travel again.

Tell us about your current research. 

I’m currently working on how global antiracist struggles in the 1950s, right after the horrors and racism of World War II energized people everywhere to imagine, and fight for, a different and better future.

What current research in your field excites you? Who is doing that research? 

Younger scholars are doing so much exciting research on subjects that have long been ignored or suppressed in France, such as the history of slavery and the Haitian Revolution, and the rich ways in which people of color have contributed to French culture, politics, and society. In addition, racialized minorities in France and francophone countries are looking to the United States right now for inspiration in their own struggles for greater equity, and for how to write the history of the lives of people on the margins. It is a great moment of transatlantic exchange for anyone who loves history.

What’s a fun fact about you that we might not know?

I am originally from Kewanee, Illinois, a small town known as the “Hog Capital of the World.” What a “brand!” Ironically there are no hogs raised there anymore, only corn and more corn.

What do you do for entertainment in your “down time” (during COVID or non-COVID)? 

I watch the many amazing series streaming on TV (mostly from abroad), I walk and walk and walk, I cook more creatively, and I zoom with a pod of far-away-friends from high school: thanks to covid, we have reconnected. Something good has come out of this grimmest of years.

Learn more about Professor Conklin here.