I graduated with a Ph.D. in history from Harvard in the spring of 2003, and joined the Williams College faculty that fall. I am currently Associate Professor of History, offering a variety of classes on Japanese history. My book Ruffians, Yakuza, Nationalists: The Violent Politics of Modern Japan, 1860-1960 with Cornell University Press came out in December 2008.

In 1997, directly after graduating from Williams, I began graduate school at the University of Virginia. I had written my BA thesis on Trinidad in the early nineteenth century, and I applied to graduate school planning to specialize in eighteenth and nineteenth century British and French imperialism in the Caribbean. I’m still with it. I’m currently turning my Ph.D. dissertation into a book, and two other major projects are scratching at the back of my mind to be worked on after that, and they all investigate aspects of British-but-used-to-be-French islands in the nineteenth-century Caribbean. That level of consistency is not required in academia, or even that common, but apparently I tend to stick to an idea once I’ve got it.

One of the best things about history research is the travel. After three years of coursework at Virginia, the dissertation required eight months in the colonial archives in London, and four months in Trinidad, plus a quick trip to Dominica, to be followed by three years of writing. The archives offered another test–did I like the part of research that involved six days a week looking at old pieces of paper? Turned out I did. Assembling a story from fragments, as the same person showed up suing a friend in the newspaper, honored by the government, and writing letters to the colonial office, was surprisingly fun.
Since 2004, I have been an Assistant Professor of History at the Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon, a position that combines the ethos of a liberal arts college (such as Williams) with the room to grow offered by a university. I teach world history from prehistory to the present, and offer thematic courses on slavery and empire and the questions, people, and ideas that sprung from those two phenomena of the modern world.

How did my history major prepare me for this career? I think the opportunity to be challenged by professors like Kohut and Dew and incredible students like Ali Garbarini, who was a peer of mine, sharpened my preparation and communication skills. These skills have been invaluable to me when raising money for our business, asking potential clients for the right to serve them, and inspiring our teams to create great things. When you couple these things with the perseverance that comes from having to crank out 5-7 page papers for Professor Kohut each week, I think it is fair to say that my History major prepared me well to withstand the tests of entrepreneurship.

There are no career limitations for the individual who understands history. Research and academia is only one obvious path. Several factors lead me in another direction. After I graduated Williams College I was required to join the Greek armed services and discovered unexpected ways in which my degree had relevance here as well. Later on, I worked in a small R and D firm in Waltham MA performing basic management functions and this lead me to a double Masters in Management and Government. Both degrees involved a strong element of management, which was a necessary addition to what I had done so far. Apart from some heavy dose of mathematics required for Management at Sloan my History background was all I needed to work through my Masters’ degrees.

After graduating from MIT, I joined the management team of a fish farm, designing and leading their restructuring program. Then I became a consultant to the Greek Minister of Foreign Affairs, worked in an executive search firm that recruited and evaluated talent for Greek and foreign multinationals and now I head the communications department of the Greek socialist party. They say that our generation will change career paths and average of 5 times in a lifetime. In such a fluid working environment it is tough to identify one sole tool worth acquiring in College. But if I were forced to make a choice, “understanding people” would be it. So far in my career it has been the undeniable foundation for anything I do.

Unlike my decision to major in history, I struggled with career choices. I stayed in Williamstown for a semester to be Mike Russo’s assistant soccer coach; I worked as a paralegal for a year and a half in Washington, D.C.; I spent a summer working on an archeological dig in Jordan through a State Department cultural exchange program; and I taught high school history and middle school geography for two years. Eventually I settled on law. I attended Ohio State’s law school, spent eight years in private practice, divided by a three-and-a-half-year stint as the State Solicitor for Ohio, and became a judge five years ago.
My current job, it seems to me, is a perfect fit for a history major. While lawyers and judges rarely talk about secondary and primary sources, much of what I do turns on determining which parts of a factual record I can trust and which ones I can’t. The same is true of debates about the meaning of laws. Efforts to uncover the meaning of the Constitution or a statute not only require historical research but also generate all manner of debates about theories for interpreting that record. What I perhaps like most about my job, however, is the puzzle-solving component to it: trying to think creatively about the fairest and most satisfactory way to resolve a wide range of conflicts. Oral arguments, whether from the perspective of a judge or an advocate, are reminiscent of the intellectual tennis that goes on in a good seminar, as the parties and court try to develop and defend a coherent position. And of course I write and write: On average, I am responsible for writing one to two ten-page opinions a week. If someone had told me in high school that this is what I would end up doing for a living and that I would like it (particularly the writing), I would have laughed. I have Williams to thank for the change.