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DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY
M.A. from our Department, resigned from teaching an undergraduate Heritage Studies class because she had been awarded a well-merited graduate fellowship to complete her Ph.D. in Cultural Studies. She was persuaded to delay her resignation for a week and Dr. Oneil Hall, a Cave Hill History Ph.D. resident in Jamaica, took on the course. Dr. Hall proved an effective teacher and colleague. I was pleased to recruit him to teach summer school, but had no more vacancies to offer to him. TEACHING: JOINT & POST-GRADUATE PROGRAMMES These transitions followed four years under Dr. Okenve, a term as chair that included the pandemic. His leadership in getting our courses back up on line was impressive and effective. Despite these distractions as Head of Department he also had overseen the development of a new final year Capstone for our History, and History and Journalism Majors, along with pushing through two joint undergraduate degree programs, one with Journalism and, more recently, a second with International Relations. The numbers enrolling in History and Journalism remain strong; those for the International Relations program remain slimmer, though more History & International Relations students enrolled in 2022–23, the second year it was offered, than on its initial offering. Both programs deliver a motivated cohort of under- graduate students into courses that the Department offers, while encouraging these classes’ re-calibration to benefit non-History majors. The International Relations program also widens the horizons for those of our students who participate. Students from other degrees are now being recruited for this program, which should make for more interesting tutorial discussions. I am pleased that History & Archaeology is contributing courses. These joint programs offer models for cooperation with sister departments and my main regret looking back on my year as Department Chair is that we did not manage to make more progress towards developing a joint degree between our undergraduate Heritage Studies and Archaeology courses with the undergraduate Tourism program, from whom our classes receive a stream of enrollees. Our inheritance of fresh course offerings from Dr. Okenve’s term as Chair also includes a recast undergraduate M.A. program in Heritage Studies. The Depart- ment had taught Heritage Studies as a one-year program that was last reconfigured in the late 1990s. However, as it increasingly recruited part-time students there were many stragglers under that schedule. At the same time the school teachers among our enrollees increasingly protested that we were asking them to do more than their peers in some other Mona M.A. programs. In 2022–23 the program was reconstructed as a part-time two-year degree taught in the evenings (at the cost of becoming a self-funded degree, where the fees appear to have chased away most school teacher candidates and prove daunting for the museum and rare-book library staff who now comprise our primary recruits. We had enquiries from pro-
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