Dr. Joseph P. Huffman is a professor of European history, Medieval & Renaissance Europe, Germany, England, Historiography, and Latin Language & Literature at Messiah University. The following are his responses to a set of interview questions put together by the history department work studies. This is the first installment in a series of responses to the following questions.
Interview Question: What courses are you teaching this semester?
Dr. Huffman’s Answer: LATN 102: Intermediate Latin and HIST 391: Historical Study of Peace.
Q: In your work as a historian, what is one of the most interesting subjects that you have researched?
A: Immigrant communities between Cologne and London who thoroughly assimilated into their new urban settings. Few if anyone expected that such migration between two European regions like this existed in the medieval period. I published a book on this research with Cambridge University Press.
Q: How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected your work as a professor and as a historian?
A: It has eliminated the possibility of travel for archival and research library-based investigations, as well as for attending international conferences where I would have presented papers. And so the only avenue open to me as a professor and historian has been teaching, which has been all-consuming given the new environment in which we are all teaching and learning together. For faculty, the multi-layered use of software packages, mini-cameras, and audio mics and trying to teach effectively to two student audience simultaneously (i.e. in-class students physically before you, and remote learners on Zoom with limited visibility and audio) has created a new and not always conducive environment for teaching, and so we have all be working very hard to adopt, adapt, and endure.
Q: What is something you have learned from history that is applicable in other areas of your life?
A:That the perennial questions of historical study – context, causation (in all its complexities and contingencies), continuity and change over time – have never been more relevant than they are at this moment in history. They have not only helped me understand my own historical situatedness in time, but they have also given me a lens through which to seek understanding and meaning in this present moment of rapid and sometimes disorienting change.
We would like to thank Dr. Hufffman for his thoughtful and insightful responses!
History on the Bridge 