My Academic Journey

My academic and professional experiences have been shaped by my time as a graduate student in modern European intellectual history at both Portland State University and the University of Oregon, and by my teaching work in history and languages. I have been studying and researching intellectual history for more than twelve years, and I am thankful to be able to work on my present topic of linguistic perfectibility and theology in German Romantic thought. My interest in this field was sparked by its holistic and interdisciplinary nature, and the opportunities it provides for exploring the history of older ideas and their potential usefulness for the future. I wanted to explore what human development and improvement means for language and knowledge, and how ideas of divinity, faith, and religion play a role in how humans orient their thinking and attain a sense of belonging in the world. My passion was also to study about a historical time period different from ours. I have been able to learn the German language over the years, and use it for my research on writings by various German Romantic thinkers. My previous coursework in history, German studies, linguistics, and religious studies has served me well to bring together many disparate fields and work on an area that is both intellectually and emotionally fulfilling for me. Presenting my project at several conferences both in our department and at regional workshops strengthened my focus and arguments, and made me rethink my evaluations of the evidence.

Alongside my research, I value the various teaching positions I have held thus far at the University of Oregon and previously in my native city in India as an English language teacher. They have encouraged me to consider a career in teaching after finishing my doctoral studies. I taught two online history courses in the summers of 2023 and 2024 on nineteenth-century Europe. I gave the students an upper-level introduction to a complex period ranging from the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars through the emergence of World War I. Using a number of sources like diplomatic records, scholarly works, literature, film, and art, I was able to connect the chief political, socio-economic, cultural, and environmental developments of this era and encourage students to write a film analysis paper for their final project. Regarding language courses, I have also been an instructor-of-record for German 203 in spring 2021 and have been scheduled to teach German 103 next term at this university. I am happy to use my German language skills to teach grammar and vocabulary in context at the introductory level for students. I hope to obtain a teaching license to teach German and history at the school level or internationally, and possibly teach the language at a Goethe Institut in India or in secondary education in the United States. I believe this would enable me to make good use of the knowledge I have obtained over the years. I also plan to develop my dissertation into a publishable book in future and contribute to the historical profession.

Having studied European and German intellectual history for several years, my experiences with interdisciplinary research and learning languages help me contribute to the scholarly community in our department. Studying in the United States after my previous schooling in India and some study abroad programmes in Germany has given me a valuable opportunity to both re-evaluate my own opinions and engage in discussions with people from different backgrounds and viewpoints. One area I try to contribute to is to make our discipline more multicultural and inclusive of international trends, especially perspectives from the Global South. History education in many countries is often centred around one’s own nation’s or region’s experience, and it can be challenging to work on international histories and cultures. In my discussion sections and teaching, I intend to present a more international perspective that gives agency to people from different parts of the world and incorporates the native languages to some extent too. For instance, in my online courses on nineteenth-century Europe, I made the curriculum more global than what a traditional course might cover, and encouraged students to study European colonialism and imperialism comparatively from the perspectives of different world regions. Owing to significant differences in our present-day economic and cultural conditions between the West and the Global South, I believe it is important to share with students that worldviews may be quite different between them.

In terms of theoretical and disciplinary approaches, I hope to contribute to the historical profession by stressing the importance of intellectual history to complement the diverse variety of historical subfields ranging from political to cultural and environmental history. The strengths of intellectual history are that it allows students to think across disciplinary boundaries and reflect on ideas from the past that they might not otherwise hear in present-day academic discourse. It can also help us engage with historiographical literature and the philosophy of history, especially at a time when historians have relatively moved away from theory-centred discussions compared to other disciplines. It is important to critique older intellectual history and make it more globally and culturally diverse, but it has the potential to offer insights to the broader profession and allow for the exploration of the agency that ideas can have in history. Also, I place greater emphasis on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in my teaching to bring more temporal diversity to the discipline, as many classes nowadays relate to the twentieth century. Monographs in this time period in German history tend to be read more often by a scholarly audience rather than the general public, who might be unfamiliar with the context and debates of the time. It is important to stress the full complexity of ideas across the political spectrum to prevent misconceptions that the early twentieth-century German turn to fascism was somehow inevitable based on earlier trajectories. Overall, I hope to make use of my strengths in historical training over the years to diversify the conversation on what constitutes “history” and deepen conversations.