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Bob Braddock
2013
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Eric Petersen
1974
2013
University president Sam Marble hired Hoffmann in 1964, and after a few years of being solo, Hoffman began his own string of hires, starting with a University of Michigan scholar named John Willertz in 1968. It’s for them that the annual Hoffman-Willertz Lecture is named. A year later, they began nationwide searches to grow the department. These were their recruits: Robert Braddock, an expert in TudorStuart England who’d earned his doctorate at Northwestern
John Jezierski, an Indiana University Ph.D. hired in 1970 who specialized in early U.S. history
Alice O’Rourke, a Civil War authority from the University of California, Berkeley, who also happened to be a nun
The faculty were hired with extreme care to ensure intellectual balance. Together, they worked well—no other members would be hired for almost two decades. And while history departments are typically hotbeds for turmoil and rivalry, the one at SVSU proved to be unique. Ken Jolly, an associate professor who joined SVSU in 2003, can recall his shock upon meeting the faculty here. “I remember settling into that dinner after a long day of interviews and being stunned at how relaxed everybody was. “Later, I was sitting in Eric’s [Petersen] living room, drinking coffee, and talking about baseball and thinking, ‘This is unreal.’” And oddly enough, this courteousness extends beyond the honeymoon stage, Jolly said. “That’s something really wonderful about our department, just how caring everybody still remains, even once you’ve been here for nine years—people still value the work that you do.”
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Eric Petersen, an expert in 20thcentury U.S. history from the University of California at Los Angeles
Thomas Renna, a historian from Brown University who specialized in medieval Europe.
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