James Heinzen

James Heinzen

“Helping Students Broaden Their View of the World”: James Heinzen on Teaching at Rowan University -- Memory #53 of 100  

Today’s Project 100 memory comes from James Heinzen.  Born and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with three brothers, he went to public schools and graduated in 1980.  His father was a lawyer, and his mother was a homemaker who worked as a librarian after his parents divorced in the early 1970s. Jim attended Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.  He began studying religion and philosophy but soon switched to the history major, largely due to the excellent faculty in that Department.  In his second year, he began studying the Russian language.  He liked languages, having already studied French in high school.  Jim began taking classes in Russian studies, taking courses in Russian history, Russian literature, and Russian sociology.  In 1983, he spent a semester studying abroad in Moscow. It was a transformative time for him, as he got to see what he was studying from the inside. There was much to dislike about the repressive Soviet system, but he came to admire many aspects of Russian culture. Not many people had the experience of living in the Soviet Union during the Cold War.  After graduating in 1984, he moved to New Haven and took several random jobs, the most enjoyable of which was working at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.  During these two years, Jim decided that he wanted to pursue a doctorate in Russian history and entered the program at the University of Pennsylvania in 1986.  After much studying, he travelled again to Moscow for his dissertation research.  This trip took place in the historic years of 1991 and 1992, and he was witness to the collapse of the Soviet Union and post-collapse economic and social chaos.  He finished his PhD in 1993, and he taught at several universities before being hired as an assistant professor by Rowan University in 2000.  Since joining the faculty, Jim has won numerous fellowships, grants, and awards.  In 2022, the College of Humanities and Social Sciences recognized his career of scholarship by presenting him with the Excellence in Research Award.  In 2023, the University made him just the second-ever winner from the Humanities of the Rowan University Research Achievement Award. 

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Rowan University was an appealing job for me for several reasons.  It was a growing public university where I could teach good students and, I hoped, pursue my research agenda. The location was also appealing, as I live near Valley Forge, PA.  The University was known to me because of the gift by Henry Rowan in the 1990s.  It was clear during my campus interview that the faculty was very dedicated to the students. After I began to teach at Rowan, I immediately realized how collegial and talented were my fellow faculty.  Even though the students (like most American college students) had very little background in Russian history (and often in European history), it was fun and rewarding to expose them to--and to get them excited about—modern Russia, modern Europe, and the history of the Cold War, the main fields in which I would offer courses.

One of the faculty that proved very important to me was Joy Wiltenburg.  She was my mentor, and she exemplified how to succeed at Rowan.  She cared deeply about her teaching, but she was also a top flight researcher who, like me, did research in a foreign language that required her to travel to distant archives.  We also both studied social and cultural history and had many great conversations over our two decades together on the faculty. Innumerable conversations about teaching and research with Edward Wang, Bill Carrigan, Emily Blanck, Lee Kress, Scott Morschauser and other faculty about teaching and research also helped to shape me into the historian that I have become.

I always enjoyed the students at Rowan. Early on in my time at Rowan, I became a co-advisor and advisor for the history honors society, Phi Alpha Theta, and the Student History Association.  It was wonderful to interact with high-achieving students who had great interest in studying the past, presenting their research, and organizing on-campus events related to history.  I enjoyed taking them to regional conferences where they spoke on their research, often winning awards, and reflecting well on the Department.

I knew very little about the most famous moment in the history of Glassboro State College when I arrived.  The 1967 Glassboro Summit between President Lyndon Johnson and Soviet Premier Aleksey Kosygin had been a world-famous event at the time, but it was soon surpassed by later summits.  Once I realized how important that Summit had been, I encouraged and joined in efforts to build programming around the Summit and what Johnson called “The Spirt of Hollybush.”  In 2007 I became the founding Director of the Hollybush Institute, and I am proud of the many events that the Institute, with the participation of faculty across campus, has sponsored in the intervening years, including talks by ambassadors Jack Matlock and Rose Gottemoeller, scholar Sergey Khrushchev (the son of Nikita), historian Kate Brown, news anchor Dan Rather, astronaut Stan Love, bestselling author Timothy Snyder, Princeton professor Julian Zelizer, and many dozens of others.  What I particularly like about bringing such speakers to Rowan was that it gives our students a chance to meet and interact with them.  Helping students broaden their view of the world by asking them to question their assumptions and interact with new ideas in a critical way has been one of the best parts of working at Rowan.

One of my initiatives that I am proud of is the History Department’s “Works in Progress” seminar.  On a drive back from the American Historical Association conference after conducting some interviews, I floated the idea of such a seminar to my colleagues, Edward Wang and Cory Blake.  They really liked the idea, especially Edward Wang, who responded that he had long wanted to have such a seminar in the Department.  The idea came especially from being visiting faculty member at Princeton where they had a works in progress seminar, a place for constructive feedback on scholarly writing in progress.  I believe that the first year was 2004, so we are coming upon the 20th anniversary.  I think that it has been very successful.  I am proud of the high level of participation, the supportive and constructive atmosphere, the quality of the comments, and the fact that so many of the works discussed were later published as either articles or parts of monographs.  Given the size of our Department, a fraction of the size of Princeton’s faculty for example, this success is attributable to the collegiality and engagement of our faculty with each other’s research. 

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This is part of the Department of History’s “Project 100,” the collection and sharing of one hundred memories by Glassboro State College and Rowan University alumni and staff in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the founding of Glassboro Normal School, later Glassboro State College, and now Rowan University.