University Times

Stressing the need for worldwide collaboration, the director of Pitt’s new World History Center said, “World history can grow only through interconnection with people around the world.”

Patrick Manning, who also is the University’s Andrew W. Mellon Professor of World History, showed off the World History Center’s web site (www.worldhistory.pitt.edu) at an Oct. 16 reception in celebration of the center’s opening.

Housed in the history department, the center also is affiliated with the global studies program and the University Center for International Studies (UCIS).

“If world historians are trying to understand big patterns in the past, they should learn to work collaboratively,” Manning said. “If world history is supposed to be interdisciplinary, world historians should be in touch with scholars in other disciplines where they’re contributing to our knowledge of the past — that is, we should go beyond reading and appropriating their conclusions, go to their meetings and learn more about their theories and methods. If world history is going to be a substantial field of research and academic discourse, then world historians should join the major academic associations. If world history is supposed to go beyond parochial outlooks to explore multiple perspectives on the past, world historians should find a way to form a worldwide network of discussion and interchange.”

In addition to emphasizing worldwide collaboration in research through conferences, publications and the development of a worldwide databank, the center will develop graduate study in world history and will reach out to secondary school world history teachers.

Symbolic of that collaboration, Manning said, is the presence of the center’s first visiting scholar, Shingo Minamizuka of Tokyo’s Hosei University, who is on campus for the fall term.

School of Arts and Sciences Dean N. John Cooper said the center pulls together many threads and traditions within the history department and in other Pitt areas. “I’m sure it will engage many faculty in other areas of Arts and Sciences, GSPIA and elsewhere in the University,” Cooper said.

He praised Manning, who came to Pitt in 2006 after 10 years at Northeastern University, where he directed its World History Center.

In his early interactions with Manning, Cooper said, “It became clear that Pat was a man of intense energy, broad ambition and exceptional breadth of vision who was the sort of person who wanted to be an institutional builder and who would be a natural at it.”

UCIS director Lawrence Feick called Manning one of the “most rare of types of people in the academy,” citing his dedication to scholarship, extensive publication record and ability to dream and think big. “But the thing that makes that all the more impressive is that Pat is a closer. He gets things done,” Feick said.

Feick pointed out the international nature of many topics in today’s headlines: the economy, global health and security issues, for instance. In the World History Center, “We have a resource now that explicitly links these issues to a historical context,” Feick said.

—Kimberly K. Barlow