DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY
Professor James Robertson, Ph.D., F.R.Hist.S . – Head of Department
INTRODUCTION Coming out of the pandemic, with all the opportunities that had been opened for distance learning, alongside the technical challenges involved in teaching remotely, to return to a post-pandemic new normal, would have made the 2022–2023 aca- demic year an interesting time for anyone to lead the Department of History & Archaeology at Mona. The absence of money made things more challenging, with Departments’ accounts seized to allow the campus to make payroll. Some events, like the Department’s 34 th annual Elsa Goveia Lecture had to be rescheduled until the necessary funds could be recovered from our accounts. Here too contributions that had formerly been made by the Campus and Regional Headquarters to support the Department’s premier annual event disappeared. We were also told us that we should add fund-raising to our activities. STAFF Among our staff one faculty member, Professor James Robertson, returned from a 2021–22 sabbatical and assumed the Chair. A second, Professor Kathleen Monteith also returned from leave but was granted a half load to accommodate her campus committee-chair duties. A third, Dr. Dexnell Peters, a St. Augustine History graduate who had followed his Johns Hopkins Ph.D. with a post-doc at Oxford and teaching at Warwick, arrived to join the Department in July, filling a long-open vacancy – and undertook a full teaching load. At the same time we lost the services of three senior colleagues, Drs. Enrique Okenve and Dr. Taka Oshikiri to well-merited sabbaticals, while our Archaeologist, Dr Zachary Beier, received a leave of absence for family reasons. As he was the Department’s only archaeologist, and indeed the only archaeologist in the three campuses’ departments, we were fortunate to recruit an experienced U.W.I. Mona graduate, Dr Lesley-Gail Atkinson-Swaby, to replace him. She has an M.Sc. from Glasgow, a Ph.D. from the University of Florida,
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