John David Smith, Charles Stone Distinguished Professor of History, is one of five finalists for the 2013 Bank of America (BofA) Award for Teaching Excellence – the University’s top teaching honor. The recipient of this year’s award will be announced during a Sept. 20 reception; Inside UNC Charlotte is featuring each finalist in alphabetical order prior to the reception.
Smith, who joined UNC Charlotte in 2005, said he has “relentlessly and aggressively” provoked his students; he challenges their assumptions on matters of race, class, gender, power and exceptionalism.
In the classroom, Smith invites his students to ask questions of and from history by highlighting the ways that circumstances, conditions and contingencies determine what is recorded and how popular understandings of the past take shape. History is not static, and Smith wants his students to examine the active role everyone plays in constructing and understanding history. He wants students to recognize how the process of engaging with the past may enhance their lives, thus “rendering them more analytical and critical in whatever life paths they pursue.”
Colleague David Johnson, in commenting about Smith’s classroom performance, wrote, “Dr. Smith pushed students to go far beyond the written word. Indeed, the class was really about the precise politics of historical memory: how we remember, what we remember, who gets to remember, who asks the questions, who answers, who gets to use these memories and how historical memory reflects power relations in a given society.”
In his career, Smith has written, edited or co-edited more than two dozen books and 150-plus scholarly articles and essays. As a teacher and scholar, he emphasizes “how and why the past remains important across time and place for informed citizens; how and why history matters for all of us in highly individualized ways; how and why understanding it informs and enhances one’s life.”
Beyond his work with students in the classroom, Smith is a public historian. He teaches thousands of nontraditional students - genealogists, lawyers, retirees, library and museum patrons and Cub Scouts. He educates boards of directors and funding agencies on the importance of integrating ethnically and racially diverse subjects into library, museum and public programs.
He also has served on many boards of directors, including the North Carolina State Archives, the African American Civil War Memorial Foundation, the Society of North Carolina Archivists (SNCA), the Levine Museum of the New South, the Historical Society of North Carolina, the North Carolina Civil War Sesquicentennial Commission and the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. For Opera Carolina’s premiere of Toni Morrison’s “Margaret Garner,” Smith served as a volunteer consultant on slave resistance. In 2010, he received the SNCA’s Thornton Mitchell Service Award for teaching, training and mentoring new members of the archival profession.
“Public historians must engage instantly with evocative questions, clear language, and, most importantly, powerful conclusions that patrons can grasp easily,” explained Smith.
A first-year student, commenting on Smith’s intellectual rigor and dedication to teaching, stated, “Dr. Smith has inspired and motivated me to succeed to a degree I never thought possible, even to the point of dreaming perhaps of one day taking the podium myself to inspire eager young students as he has inspired me.”
Read about other 2013 finalists profiled in Inside UNC Charlotte - Ted Amato and Kimberly Buch.