I am a professor of history. I earned my B.A. at Yale University and my M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Michigan. I joined the UI faculty in 1967, the year before I finished my dissertation, which the late William B. Willcox supervised. I chaired the department from 1984-85 through 1993-94. In the fall semester 1995 I had the opportunity to serve the university one-fourth time as secretary of Faculty Council, and from 1996-97 to the present I divide my appointment equally between the department of history and the Office of the Secretary to the Faculty. In the spring semester 1997 I was away from the university on a sabbatical leave for research.

At the UI I have taught introductory survey courses in western civilization and East Asia. Currently my favorite lower division course is a survey of world civilizations for students in the honors program. My upper division courses have included a survey of the history of England, Tudor and Stuart England, the department's senior seminar, and directed studies in topics mainly related to the history of England. A premise of my teaching philosophy is that students are responsible for their education.

My research is in high politics in eighteenth-century England. My current project for the period 1788-1833 studies the effort of the West India interest in the British House of Commons to block legislation that regulated and eventually abolished the slave trade and slavery in British possessions. For that research I have used the printed journals of the House of Commons at the University of London's Institute for Historical Research, microfilm copies of the minutes of the West India Committee at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, and many printed and manuscript sources in the British Library. I have also read in collections at the Huntington Library. I have reported on my findings at meetings of the North American Conference on British Studies, most recently at the conference's annual meeting in Vancouver, B.C., in October 1994. I plan to complete the project during the 1998-99 academic year.

My wife, Cynthia J. Schwenk, Ph.D., is an associate professor of history at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Greek and Roman history are her special fields. We meet in the early 1970s when she taught ancient history in the UI department of history. Our marriage took place on New Years Day 1997. In the spring semester she will be on leave from her university to be in Moscow to help me prepare for retirement in June and the move to Atlanta.

My am proud of my two adult sons. Alden has two concurrent careers, one as a molecular biologist in a lab at the University of Washington's medical school, the other in partnership with his wife as a luthier and musician. Philip is a high school physical education teacher and athletic trainer in Bow, New Hampshire.