User talk:Optional field

I'll complete this at a latter date. In the meantime, feel free to leave appropriate comments as you feel or think appropriate.

I'm a professional academic (for the time being at least). My degrees are in history, but my research interests may step outside the boundaries of history narrowly defined.

Currently, my research interests are Social History, broadly defined. More specifically, I'm work in the history of race and race relations, especially in the US and Canada, Jewish studies, whiteness studies, and African-American studies. A further interest is memory, which for the sake of argument, I'll define here as the social and intellectual history of understandings of the past. In Simple English, to study memory is to look at how people remember the past. In studying memory, I would not examine, the actual causes of the American Civil War, the Great Depression, or World War II. Instead I would look at what people BELIEVE are the causes of these events, and how these events are seen to unfold in retrospect.

I'm also interested in the history of technology. Although I haven't done much work on that recently.