Lance C. Thurner
Assistant Teaching Professor
Department of History
Rutgers University, Newark
I teach Latin American history to the amazing students at Rutgers University in Newark and I love every day of it! A great deal of my attention goes to learning about my students – both as individuals and as cohorts – and about pedagogical best practices to advance student success and ensure that all participants find my classrooms welcoming, inspiring, and supportive. I am excited about the incredible intellectual resources students bring to Rutgers from their experiences, their homes, and their backgrounds. In my teaching practice I seek ways to leverage these resources to further student learning, build trust, foster intellectual confidence, and cultivate student belonging.
I am especially dedicated to exploring, employing, and developing innovative and student-centered instructional methods to teach information literacy, critical analysis, and historical thinking. The most visible fruit of this work are my digital teaching projects, including this site, States of Belonging. Through this project, intro-level students examine the connections, parallels, and contrasts between their own experiences of collective identity and historical case studies of nationalism in Latin America. Using a storymaps interface, students combine their interpretations of scholarly readings and primary sources with personal experiences to develop information literacy and critical thinking skills and to contemplate how historical knowledge matters. I encourage the reader to explore my students’ smart and thought-provoking creations. Also see my prior projects Empire’s Progeny and Alternative Western Civ. Beyond these flashy projects, my every course and every class period features active-learning methods. Through historical research at local institutions, pedagogical role-playing games, and countless in-class activities my students practice with their minds, senses, and bodies how to think critically and historically. Presently, I am particularly interested in how liberal arts educators can shift our stance regarding Artificial Intelligence away from being naysayers to becoming students’ partners and mentors in navigating this challenging information environment while at the same time pursuing classical learning objectives like reading comprehension, argumentation, writing, and reflexive thinking.
I am also a historian of science and medicine in Latin America. My research concerns the production of racial and medical knowledge in late-colonial and early national Mexico, in particular the role of indigenous communities and other subaltern actors in the circulation of knowledge between spaces in Mexico and Europe and North America. Through this work, I contribute to the wider efforts of historians to globalize the history of science and medicine by extending our notions of what constitutes scientific knowledge and who does science. Some short, fun examples aimed at popular audiences can be found here:
My professional activities also concern the future of adjunct labor in American colleges and universities. As a member of the Organization of American Historians’ (OAH) Committee on Part-Time, Adjunct, and Contingent Employment (CPACE), I organize events in which practitioners in the discipline can discuss the long-term consequences of adjunctification for historical scholarship and pedagogical practice. I am currently updating the OAH’s Best Practices and Standards for Part-Time, Adjunct, and Contingent Faculty and convening workshops to gain feedback from diverse perspectives from across the discipline.
I earned my doctorate in History at Rutgers University and a Master of Arts in Oral History from Columbia University.
I can be reached at lancet (at) rutgers.edu
