S2E5 Interview with Liam Riordan - Democracy and the Humanities

Today, we have with us Liam Riordan, Adelaide and Alan Bird Professor of History at the University of Maine and serves as Chair on the City of Bangor’s Historic Preservation Commission. Riordan was the past Director of the University of Maine McGillicudy Humanities Center, is a past board member of the Maine Humanities Council, and has been a faculty member since 1997. In his current role, Riordan helps organize Maine National History day, a statewide history contest for middle and high school students. His recent work has included him traveling across Maine giving talks such as “What Did We Learn from the Maine State Bicentennial? Reflections on Historical Commemoration”. He also gave a talk titled “Picturing Maine’s Indigenous Context”.

Transcript

Eric Miller: Welcome to Maine Policy Matters, a podcast from the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center at the University of Maine. I am Eric Miller, research associate at the

center. Today we have with us Liam Riordan, Adelaide and Allenberg, professor of history at the University of Maine and serves as chair on the city of Bangor’s Historic Preservation Commission, Riordan was the past director of the University of Maine McGillicuddy Humanities Center, is a past board member of the Maine Humanities Council, and has been a faculty member since 1997. In his current role, Riordan helps organize Maine National History Day, a statewide history contest for middle and high school students. His recent work has included him traveling across Maine, giving talks such as “What Did We Learn from The Maine State Bicentennial? Reflections on Historical Commemoration. He also gave a talk entitled “Picturing Maine’s Indigenous Context.”

Miller: Hi, Liam. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Riordan: Hey, it’s great to be here. I’m happy to be invited to Maine Policy Matters.

Miller: So what brought you into the field of humanities and what role does this subject play in discussing American history and modern policy issues?

Riordan: So I’m a history professor at the University of Maine, and I arrived here in 1997, and so my initial way of understanding my work as a historian was a somewhat traditional academic understanding that I’d be a scholar. I do original research about the American Revolutionary era, which is my period of specialization and that I would teach undergraduate courses of all sorts, big survey classes to 150 students, small upper-level classes, and one of the real privileges of being a member of the history department at the University of Maine is that we are the only PhD-granting department in the humanities in the entire state of Maine. And so I think that’s a really interesting responsibility, and it’s an aspect of the history department at the University of Maine that I’m really proud of.

Miller: Yeah, very nice. Thank you so much for entering that field and contributing in such a way and taking on a public service to this degree in being so involved and I know the university is paying some dividends from your, from your service. Could you tell us a bit by what you mean, chatting about the public humanities, and how this relates to policy specifically.

Riordan: So this is really a significant way in which my understanding of my role as a history professor changed over the course of my 20 plus years at the University of Maine I, I mentioned earlier when I began, I really thought of myself as a scholar and as a teacher both at the undergraduate and graduate level. But, I now realize that there is really an important role for university faculty to play in helping to lead the public humanities in Maine, and what I mean by that is that the humanities have a really vital role to play not just in the scholarly and university tradition, but the kind of impact that the history, particularly, but the humanities more broadly, should have on how we understand life in Maine in the 21st century. And so in this sense, it has a real s