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I was Roy’s student and worked with him at the Center for History and New Media for ten years. Working with Roy gave me a skewed, somewhat utopian perspective of what academia was really like. He was always happy to meet with me. He read all of my chapters within a week. He was in the audience when I presented my first conference paper and many times when I presented afterward. His letters of recommendation were written well before the deadline and required no reminder. One would expect that it would be stressful to have an adviser who was also your boss. And yet looking back at emails from that period it seems that it was me who constantly complained about needing to prepare a job talk or a paper, and it was Roy who always patiently sacrificed deadlines to give me time off. In fact, his Center have provided, and still does, this kind of flexible support to dozens of graduate students who have worked there through the years. Roy even gave me rides from campus to the metro occasionally so I didn’t have to take a bus. I was completely spoiled. I actually thought it was a matter of course to expect all these things from your adviser until I talked to my friends and found out that theirs did nothing of the sort.
Today, now that I know how rare that experience had been, I would like to mention some things that I learned from Roy.
For example, Roy taught me some of my English, my second language. From him, I first heard words like “deep-six,” as it “to deep-six this unconvincing argument,” and academic stock phrases such as “a study that fills a much-needed gap.” I learned my email-speak from Roy—how to say “thanks!” constantly no matter how trivial the task done for you; how to send encouraging one-liners, “That’s great! Roy,” in response to emails most people would ignore; how to preface work assignments with “whenever you have time” and “no rush on this,” when you really mean “do it as soon as you can.”
Roy taught me how to be a researcher. He researched everything. At the first memorial for Roy at George Mason University in Arlington, a friend of his described how Roy embarked on a research project to get a letter to the editor published in the <em>New York Times</em>. He determined the published letters often started with “We are shocked and dismayed,” and used the phrase. The letter was published. Roy demanded the same dedication from his students and research assistants. I still remember how I spent hours going through the <em>Washington Post</em> in search of a Doonesbury cartoon for him that gave the only two possible reasons for producing web sites as “fear and greed,” and then through the Hearst press from the 1940s in search of an anti-Sidney Hillman limerick, to include on the <em>Who Build America</em> CD. The limerick was not printed when Steven Fraser’s book <em>Labor Will Rule</em> claimed it would be, but several weeks later. None of his students could get away with close readings of a few texts—a method then popular in my field of historical cultural studies. I don’t need to refer to <em>The Chicago Manual of Style</em> to format my book; I can refer to Roy’s and Elizabeth Blackmar’s <em>The Park and the People</em>, a study that cites every possible kind of source, and has the most elaborate abbreviation system I have yet to encounter in a work of scholarship.
Roy taught me how to comment on other people’s work. When he showed me how to rewrite completely one of my less successful drafts, in a 5-page single-spaced line-by-line commentary, he was quite direct and at times sarcastic. To one of my wilder propositions he responded, “I am prepared to believe that this is the case, but the claims here seem to rest on two anecdotes.” Yet he was also kind—he also used, quite without foundation, words “perceptive,” “well-written,” and “wonderful,” the latter three times. I’m not sure Roy was capable of writing comments that were not detailed—he gave such thorough responses not just to dissertation and book chapters but also to papers he assigned in his Clio Wired class (an introduction to digital history) that he invented and taught for years.
Roy taught me how to be a radical historian. I read mounds of books that claimed to provide ever more radical readings of various practices and texts. In contrast, it was useful to encounter Roy’s less ostentatious, everyday brand of radicalism. At the first memorial for Roy at George Mason University in Arlington, Alison Landsberg, his friend, colleague, and neighbor, read an email from Roy and Deborah from 2003 where they invited friends to participate in an antiwar candlelight vigil in Arlington, Virginia. “If there is interest,” they wrote, “we would be happy to organize a group dinner of take out food at our house before hand (5:30?) or after.” At the time it seemed that mass demonstrations in DC, while inspiring to participants, changed neither gender policies nor war plans of the Bush Administration. Yet Roy never gave up. Every single one of his projects—from an antiwar vigil to his work at the <em>Radical History Review</em> to convincing the AHA to make articles in the <em>American Historical Review</em> available for free on the web—aimed at getting things done. The Center for History and New Media, which he founded to democratize history, is perhaps his most important work of radical scholarship.
Most importantly, in doing all of the above, Roy taught me how to be a human being. He ignored no one—at every meeting or party, he would make sure to find the least important person in the room and strike up a conversation. Even after he became ill and was often tired he continued to help colleagues, advise students, direct the Center, and of course, answer his email. Many people had no idea how ill he was and where shocked by his passing because he never stopped being Roy, in any circumstances.
I miss the sense of security Roy gave his students immensely and yet I will always have his sense of purpose in doing history. Most of all, I miss him. Thanks, Roy.
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Morning Coffee with Roy, Roy as Mentor""
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You must be 13 years of age or older to submit material to us. Your submission of material constitutes your permission for, and consent to, its dissemination and use in connection with Thanks, Roy in all media in perpetuity. If you have so indicated on the form, your material will be published on Thanks, Roy (with or without your name, depending on what you have indicated). Otherwise, your response will only be available to approved researchers using Thanks, Roy. The material you submit must have been created by you, wholly original, and shall not be copied from or based, in whole or in part, upon any other photographic, literary, or other material, except to the extent that such material is in the public domain. Further, submitted material must not violate any confidentiality, privacy, security or other laws. By submitting material to Thanks, Roy you release, discharge, and agree to hold harmless Thanks, Roy and persons acting under its permission or authority, including a public library or archive to which the collection might be donated for purposes of long-term preservation, from any claims or liability arising out the Thanks, Roy's use of the material, including, without limitation, claims for violation of privacy, defamation, or misrepresentation. Thanks, Roy has no obligation to use your material. You will be sent via email a copy of your contribution to Thanks, Roy. We cannot return any material you submit to us so be sure to keep a copy. Thanks, Roy will not share your email address or any other information with commercial vendors.
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What follows is a speech I wrote for the special AHA session in Roy’s memory on January 5, abridged to avoid duplicating my other post on this site.
I worked with Roy at the Center for History and New Media for ten years, from 1995 to 2005, and he also was my thesis adviser form 1998 until I graduated in 2004. I will talk about what it was like to work with him at the Center and to have him as a mentor. And because my relationship with Roy was mediated by technology I’ll talk about Roy’s relationship with technology as well.
Several times in conversations with Roy I heard him speculate why there are not more hit TV series and movies about historians. TV shows and films about doctors and cops are popular, he used to say, because they are always urgently needed to save lives somewhere. If only we could come up with an emergency that would urgently require an intervention by a historian, played perhaps by Nicholas Cage or Angelina Jolie, who could rush to the scene and save the day, the discipline would have much better representation in American popular culture.
I think Roy was skeptical about this possibility. However, in some ways, working with Roy was like this imaginary action movie. It was exciting and it was full of emergencies.
I began working at the Center as its only employee. The center was Roy, Mike O’Malley, and me, with a standard Mac desktop for a server, located in a closet in a former student dormitory, with only six web pages on it. Of course, now there are dozens of historical websites and tools produced at the Center, but for the first few years we only had two or three. Eventually, we could afford top-of-the-line equipment and put it in a secure facility with multiple backups, but for the first few years that wasn’t an option. Web servers crash. Roy however, refused to acknowledge that fact. Once on an anniversary of 9/11 Jim Sparrow and I accidentally unplugged the machine that was serving millions of connections to our September 11 Digital Archive, and could not restart it for several minutes because the database got corrupted. For Roy, who was pacing back and forth watching us trying to repair the damage, every second our historical data stayed offline was agony.
There were times when Roy would drive in to GMU’s Fairfax campus himself on a snow day—a real emergency in Virginia—to restart a crashed server as soon as possible. Roy never asked me outright to drop everything and spend 5 to 10 hours trying to work out the problem but he had a way of pausing on the phone, or nervously walking around in person that conveyed the message very well.
I can’t say I didn’t resent the havoc Roy’s work ethic did to my social life. If I had a dinner engagement, I cancelled it. If I was on vacation in San Francisco, I had to go into a closest café with wireless to solve problems remotely. Immediately after arriving to any city, I looked for Starbucks coffee shops (that were guaranteed to have wireless access), to be ready in case an emergency would occur.
Once I was on the metro right before Ballston station on my way to work when I got a call from Roy. It turned out that Pennee Bender from the American Social History project was presenting on our History Matters site at a conference. Her presentation was to start in 5 minutes and she just discovered that the search page didn’t work. I had to get off the train, out of the Ballston station, into the Starbucks, and fix the search in 5 minutes—as always for Roy, failure wasn’t an option.
At first I was surprised at how seriously Roy took every glitch, but then I realized that he did this because he had a strong sense of purpose and a clear idea of how to accomplish it. For him, history only made sense as a democratic project. He believed that digital media could democratize history, and to this end he produced historical websites, spoke at innumerable meetings, wrote grant proposals, and promoted collaborative and open source scholarship. Keeping the server always on was just a minor manifestation of his larger vision and his determination to accomplish it.
Working with Roy as a student resembled an action film in a different way—the emergencies where all mine and he was the one who saved the day. Quite simply, I would not be a historian today if it wasn’t for Roy. I’m Russian, and it would have been impossible for me to finish school if I didn’t have a job at CHNM at the same time. He had to fill out mounds of extra paperwork to hire me, and when my American visa got delayed for two months, Roy didn’t give up and kept the job open for me when he didn’t have to.
Many students claim being close to their advisers—Roy was generous in ways that this common phrase doesn’t really describe. He would be always happy to meet with me, and always enthusiastic about my work, but when a conversation would approach a conclusion, he would just say “Ok” with a certain inflection, and I would know that I had to get out of the office so he could move on to other work. We communicated as much over email and instant messaging as in person. Roy once told me how he and Deborah, working on two separate floors of their house, simultaneously got emails with links to the YouTube video of Stephen Colbert mocking President Bush at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Only later did they realize that they were watching the video on different computers at the same time. One could imagine that Roy and Deborah sometimes communicated by email in the house as well. But in my case, the way Roy used email was much more valuable than any heart-to-heart conversations we didn’t have.
It was remarkable enough that Roy could answer an email within seconds if it was about Center business, but what I appreciated even more was that when I asked him to help with my own work his responses were just as fast. During the celebration of Roy’s life in December, people were offering statistics on thousands of emails they got from Roy. Here are some statistics on how little time it took for Roy to get back to me over email about my research.
Reading and commenting on my book prospectus: 17 hours
Reading and commenting on reader reviews of my book manuscript: 9 hours
Answering a question about my dissertation: 10 minutes
Answering the last question I asked him, about a book we both had read, on September 26, 2007: 2 hours.
How Roy found the time to reply this fast, I have no idea. He knew and communicated with so many people in the US and beyond—when I was about to move to Montreal to teach Roy sat down with me and gave names of a half a dozen digital humanities scholars he knew in Canada. In September 2005, over iChat, I asked Roy to read something of mine, and as always, he immediately agreed. Then he tried to figure out when he would actually do it. Here is what he wrote on IM:
Roy Rosenzweig: maybe not this weekend
Roy Rosenzweig: but monday
Roy Rosenzweig: maybe
Roy Rosenzweig: i have plane flight and hopefully could do then
Roy Rosenzweig: i have picnic tomorrow and then antiwar march
Roy Rosenzweig: and then various people are staying over
Roy Rosenzweig: i have conferences all next week
I know that what he had done for me he did for hundreds of other people. Thanksroy.org is full of testimonies of people he helped. I think he was such a perfect mentor precisely because one didn’t have to be his favorite student or colleague to count on his help and unwavering support. His commitment to social equality was not just academic, it encompassed everything he did—researching working-class culture, helping students, going to antiwar rallies, and lobbying for open source scholarship. Many brilliant historians exist but I haven’t met anyone as ethical and committed as Roy. He provided more than conventional history instruction; he taught by example.
Roy was always there when one of his friends, colleagues, or students needed help yet anything more than a cursory expressions of gratitude made him uncomfortable. I got so desperate about this that when Roy asked me to write a letter in support of a grant the Center was applying for, I used the letter to thank him for many things he had done for me, and then asked him to proofread it to make sure that he actually looked at the words. Among other things, I wrote, “It would not be an exaggeration to say that my years at CHNM”—and as Roy’s student—“transformed my understanding of the purpose and practice history. I will always be grateful for this experience.” Thanks, Roy.
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I did not see Roy on a daily or even a monthly basis. Like everyone else, we were preoccupied with our own daily chores and routines. So, over the past 2 months it's been easier for me to busy myself with work and to pretend that Roy's still here, busily tending to his many projects and responsibilities over at the Center and beyond.
Now that the semester's winding down and the season's first snow has arrived (at least here in northern Virginia), I'm might just be ready to stop and remember Roy instead of waiting to see him one more time--at one more faculty meeting, one more picnic, one more job candidate's dinner (coating a salad with salt).
I relied upon Roy's presence (and am now feeling his absence) in so many ways, both spoken and unspoken. He was the soul of our department.
During my first years on the job, Roy provided comfort and reassurance during moments of uncertainty and self-doubt. He was a much respected senior colleague, who listened like a trusted friend--a personal quality for which I will always be grateful and which I will never forget.
Thank you, Roy, for everything--your humor, intelligence, creativity, integrity, dedication, and, most of all, your compassion and kindness. Peace.
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When Roy took me on as a Ph.D. student in 1998, I've been through three American universities and several advisers. I was alone in the US--my entire family was back in Russia. I was also broke and ready to give up. If it wasn't for Roy I would probably be working in a bank in Moscow right now. Instead I teach history at a university in Montreal. I owe both my career as a historian and my urban bohemian lifestyle to Roy.
Roy approached my education, as he did many things, as a collaborative project, and all of a sudden instead of no advisers, I had two great ones, Roy and Mike O'Malley. And he gave me a job at CHNM so I could earn enough money to survive in the US. Roy was a perfect adviser--he was always there when I needed help yet did not demand any adoration or flattery in return. In fact, he found any expression of gratitude annoying. I still have Roy’s comments on all of my chapters--he wrote pages of detailed suggestions for revision, complete with spelling and grammar corrections (particularly relevant in my case). I could always count on him to write a letter for me or to help with a grant, no matter how exasperated he was with a last-minute request. When I applied to the university where I'm teaching now, the committee unexpectedly requested a second long letter from Roy, to be emailed the same day, dealing specifically with my work in digital history. I went to his office, and he wrote it right then, in ten minutes, even though he was extremely busy. I wouldn't have gotten that job if he didn't take time to write that letter. Roy didn't just teach historiography and method--from him I learned why history only makes sense as a democratic project, by talking to him, reading his books and comments, working with him at the Center, and listening to his stories about his many friends who did history elsewhere.
As others have pointed out here, Roy was generous to all of his students and junior colleagues. Many times, Roy would mention a manuscript he had read for a former student, or an outline for a book he had commented on for a former colleague, or a letter he had written for someone. When in 2007 Roy received a Distinguished Service Award from the OAH, the program included a short film by a high school student. The very first thing Roy did after the ceremony ended was to turn to the student and talk to her at length about her project. In one of his last published articles he made sure to emphasize the importance of a dissertation in progress by one of his students.
I know what he did for me he would have done for anyone, but I needed it more. I miss him every day.
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You must be 13 years of age or older to submit material to us. Your submission of material constitutes your permission for, and consent to, its dissemination and use in connection with Thanks, Roy in all media in perpetuity. If you have so indicated on the form, your material will be published on Thanks, Roy (with or without your name, depending on what you have indicated). Otherwise, your response will only be available to approved researchers using Thanks, Roy. The material you submit must have been created by you, wholly original, and shall not be copied from or based, in whole or in part, upon any other photographic, literary, or other material, except to the extent that such material is in the public domain. Further, submitted material must not violate any confidentiality, privacy, security or other laws.
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