 |
Derek Catsam is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin, where he teaches Modern United States history and Modern African history with an emphasis on race, politics, and social movements. He engages in research and writes in both Modern United States and Modern South African history, striking a balance between both areas despite the tendency of the academy to distrust those who cast their scholarly net widely but also seek depth. He is currently at work on manuscripts on the Freedom Rides, Global Terrorism, and the Boston Red Sox.
Derek was born and raised in Newport, New Hampshire, a small mill town about 45 minutes south of Hanover and Dartmouth College, and 45 minutes north of Concord. Derek was active in music and sports which helped gain him admission to Williams College where, in addition to double-majoring in history and political science, he was captain of the Williams track and field team and he sang with the Williams Octet. After a year, Derek (wisely) turned his back on his initial plan to go to law school, and instead he began an MA program at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where he wrote an MA thesis on the Integration of Ole Miss under the guidance of David Goldfield. Derek is in the process of turning that project into a monograph. In the fall of 1996 he began his PhD program in American history at Ohio University, where he was in the Contemporary History Institute. However, earlier that year he won a Rotary International postgraduate fellowship to spend a year at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. During that year he began an extensive project on the role of the security forces in undermining the anti-Apartheid struggle in the Eastern Cape in the 1980s. He plans to turn this into a book or series of articles in the coming two years.
In 1998 Derek returned to Athens where he continued with his PhD work, combining his American work with continued research interest in Africa. After two years on dissertation fellowships in Washington, DC, he finished his dissertation, “‘A Brave and Wonderful Thing’: The Freedom Rides and the Integration of Interstate Transport, 1941-1965,” which is now under contract with Louisiana State University Press, which plans to include the book in its new series, “Making the Modern South.” He received his PhD from Ohio in 2003. In August 2002 he began a tenure-track assistant professorship at Minnesota State, Mankato . in 2003 he was awarded a fellowship from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies which sent him and a group of fellows to Israel to do anti-terrorism work. He has also led high school students to do community service and peace work in Ireland and Northern Ireland, and he has returned to Africa to research and travel extensively. He has received research fellowships from the Virginia Historical Society, the Institute for Southern Studies at the University of South Carolina, and the Deep South Regional Humanities Center at Tulane. In the spring of 2004 he was a research and writing fellow at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities in Charlottesville. Derek moved to west Texas in the summer of 2004.
Finally, and perhaps most significantly, Derek is a lifelong, die hard (is there any other type) sports fan, especially of the Boston Red Sox. Despite the fact that he occasionally shows some modicum of promise, he apparently loses all sense of perspective when he avers that the Red Sox winning the World series in 2004 may have been the greatest moment of his life.
He is honored to join the Safundi editorial board.
|
|
|
|
Safundi Publications
P.O. Box 206788
New Haven, CT 06520
(203) 548-9155 / Phone
(203) 548-9177 / Fax
info@safundi.com
|
|
|
