The History of the 21st Century (H/21) project is excited to announce that Jesse Spohnholz will be its new director!
After a COVID slumber during 2020, H/21 is excited to have renewed energy under Spohnholz’s leadership. The founding directors, Trevor Getz and Steve Harris, remain actively involved in the project as members of the Executive Board.
Jesse Spohnholz is an award-winning educator and researcher with over two decades experience teaching General Education courses. In 2012, he became the founding director of the Roots of Contemporary Issues Program at Washington State University, an innovative General Education program that helps first-year students make sense of their lives – and some of the most controversial and pressing issues facing them – by studying world history. He brings many years of experience inspiring skeptical students, training fellow educators, and revising course curriculum through data-driven assessment.
Spohnholz, whose own research centers on the history of refugees, will begin his work this fall recruiting collaborators and producing materials to help support colleagues at diverse types of institutions to innovate and inspire in their introductory college history classes. Recruitment will start with world historians this year and move to American historians in the summer of 2022.