Jessica Swigger (PhD '08) Talks About How Steve Hoelscher Inspired Her Career

In a short post featured on the Pearson website, Jessica Swigger (PhD '08) describes how UT AMS Faculty Steve Hoelscher has inspired her in her career as a professor. We've included an excerpt below. Congratulations to Jessica and Steve!

“Steve informed everything about how I approach my job,” Jessie, an associate professor of history at Western Carolina University, said about her inspirational professor.Jessie first met Steve when she took his Memory and Place course at the University of Texas (UT), Austin. “The point of the course is to examine how members within different cultures and societies do certain things to remember a shared past as well as to forget a shared past,” explained Steve, a professor of American Studies.“I was really inspired by that class,” Jessie recalled. “Steve was studying the kind of things that I was interested in.” His enthusiasm for the subject was infectious, and it sparked her interest in public history, the way history is put to work in the world in fields like museum curatorship and historic preservation. Jessie eventually decided to specialize in this area of American Studies, writing her dissertation on the history of Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village and choosing Steve as her advisor.