Friday Profile: Thurnau Professor Brian Porter-Szűcs

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When a professor receives a standing ovation from his students at the semester's end, he must be doing something right. And something rare as well: in the words of one student of Thurnau Professor of History Brian Porter-Szűcs, “the much deserved standing ovation was something I have never seen before or since.”

Porter-Szűcs certainly doesn’t win his students’ acclaim by taking on obviously popular topics. His courses on the history of Poland and the development of the Catholic Church, for instance, focus on subject matter about which many students report having had no prior interest or knowledge. And his courses often treat grim and difficult themes such as the effects of war and the moral complexities of major European social struggles.

But as both students and colleagues report, Porter-Szűcs is beloved for his remarkable commitment to taking undergraduates seriously as intellectual interlocutors and key members of the History department’s academic community. In his undergraduate classes, he engages students as fellow thinkers by giving them primary documents along with a range of historical interpretations—often arguments with which he fundamentally disagrees—and asking them to come to their own conclusions. He uses class blogs to facilitate their interactions with one another’s analyses. And he inspires students to pursue their intellectual passions beyond the bounds of the classroom. Under his guidance as the department's first Director of Undergraduate Studies, the once-moribund History Club has grown into a vibrant intellectual community for undergraduate concentrators. And under his mentorship, a steady stream of students have proceeded to post-graduate study, many of whom who say they would never had thought of themselves as scholars before taking one of his courses. In short, students stand up and applaud Porter-Szűcs not because he entertains them but because he respects them as thinkers.

They do also admit, though, that he is an extraordinarily engaging speaker.

The language that students use to describe his courses can sound a lot like rave reviews of a Hollywood movie: his lectures are “riveting,” “absolutely brilliant,” “phenomenal,” "elegant," and "awesome." His highly energetic lectures often seamlessly weave in multimedia components—films, photographs, news clippings—to vivify historical contexts and invite student analysis of primary materials. And he has come to be known at U-M as a leading innovator of large course teaching in the humanities through his thoughtful integration of new technologies, including his (in the words of one colleague) "masterful" use of iClickers to guage student learning during lecture.

But what students remember most keenly about Porter-Szűcs's teaching in the long run is not so much his impressive performances in the lecture hall as the productive exchange of ideas that he fosters, both with and between students. As one former student put it, “Professor Porter-Szűcs not only discussed his ideas, he explained exactly how he located and organized his sources. In doing so he showed how historians research and write. Just as important, however, he brought me into a collegial environment—a space where people communicate with each other because it makes their work better.”

For more information about the Thurnau Professorships, see this page [2]. For other examples of outstanding teaching at U-M, click on the "Friday Profile" tag below.