FACULTY OF HUMANITIES AND EDUCATION
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spective international students, but no bites). Some of the program’s courses do recruit additional graduate students from Anthropology. There were operational problems when the University’s Vacancy Monitoring Committee took it upon itself not to authorize the Department to recruit a temporary instructor to teach a key class in Semester One, though we were permitted to hire that instructor in Semester Two instead. This intervention did not help the program’s operation. Students had to fit a wide-ranging course in alongside their efforts to write up. They still managed a better completion rate than the former one-year program’s graduates, but fewer lessons from the final semester course were adopted into the students’ research designs than was intended. A second cohort of this two-year program will commence in September. I hope that this group will not suffer the same disruptions in their second year when there will be a similar need to recruit an additional instructor for this program in Semester One of 2025. The Department retains a postgraduate program in History and a number of our faculty and instructors are graduates or candidates of this program. Over the last few years it has steered some would-be Ph.D.s into the Department – one of whose defense should be scheduled in semester one of 2023–24, but the numbers are low and our Ph.D. completions are dishearteningly slow. This year we received an able British candidate on a Leverhume fellowship, who is working towards an interesting M.Phil. project. However, these classes have only enrolled between one and two students when offered, and for a Department with a small faculty to tie up both its professors teaching classes with enrollments of one does not appear particularly efficient. I suspended further recruitment to this program in 2023–24 and suspect that several of its more venerable classes will need substantial updating to incor- porate twenty-first century scholarship before they are offered again. STAFF TRANSITIONS & TEACHING OFFERINGS This Department, like others on campus, has been facing a number of transitions, with posts left unfilled after retirements or departures. Some vacancies have now remained unfilled for over a decade and these empty lines are increasingly vul- nerable to transfer to other departments or faculties. This Department will cease to have a trained Europeanist after the current incumbent retires at the end of August, although department members plan to offer occasional survey courses on Europe’s early modern, nineteenth- and twentieth-century history when their crowded schedules permit. They do believe that this troublesome continent’s past continues to merit consideration by students here in the Caribbean. We are also missing a South Americanist, which undercuts the University’s broader engage- ment with the region.
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