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The Department
 


Keefer Photo
 Brad Keefer

I have enjoyed a long association with Kent State University dating back to my undergraduate work in the 1970s. I earned my B.A. here in 1980 and an M.A in 1984. I had the pleasure of writing my master’s thesis on the 104th Ohio Infantry in the Civil War under the guidance of the late Dr. Frank L. Byrne. After spending several years as a volunteer research director for the Ohio Society of Military History in Massillon, I began teaching history survey courses as an adjunct at the Kent State Tuscarawas Campus in 1987. This led to a long stretch of regular adjunct teaching at the Stark Campus, where I took on additional work as an academic advisor and campus historian. I returned to Kent State as a graduate student in 1994 and finished my dissertation, “Constructing Memories on the ‘River of Death’: Conflict, Landscape, and the Impact of the Spanish-American War on the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park” in December 2006. I was hired as Assistant Professor at the Ashtabula Campus shortly thereafter, where I plan to teach upper division courses on the Civil War, Reconstruction, Victorian England, and other courses on 19th and 20th century U.S. and cultural history. We hope that by offering a wide range of history courses we can further the Ashtabula Campus’s role in propelling students towards completing baccalaureate degrees in the Kent State University system. The particular challenge facing students at Ashtabula Campus is the distance from the Kent Campus where they must complete a B.A. degree in history. Many of the students in my classes are working towards Bachelor’s in General Studies, so I have been constructing my courses in ways that benefit both the history majors and these more broadly focused students. I have a number of specific research goals. In addition to trimming and revising the dissertation into a monograph, I would like to produce several articles on the Spanish-American War experience at Chickamauga Park and the controversies that followed them and eventually write a biography of Union veteran and park founder Henry Van Ness Boynton. There may also be an opportunity to write and publish regimental history on the 104th Ohio using new material that I have recently discovered. When not doing scholarly stuff, I enjoy reenacting the colonial and Civil War periods, drinking good beer, and hunting whitetail deer and wild turkeys.

Recent events:

I attended the Society of Civil War Historians Conference in Philadelphia, June 15-17, 2008 where our very own Julie Mujic did a fine job presenting a paper.

I submitted a paper proposal entitled “No Trundle Beds or Soothing Syrup:” Henry V. Boynton Responds to the Typhoid Fever Crisis at Chickamauga Park, 1898” to the Southern Historical Association for the 2009 Annual Meeting in Louisville, Ky.