On Saturday, 12 April 2025, the Department of History hosted the first North East Ohio Regional Meeting of Phi Alpha Theta, the national history honorary, since COVID. Held in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Ohio Academy of History, the conference provided an opportunity for almost two dozen undergraduate history students from around the region to present their work in a professional setting. Four of the department’s graduate students served as chairs/discussants for panels, and a fifth panel was chaired by one of the department’s MA/PhD graduates. The student leaders of the department’s Psi Chapter of Phi Alpha Theta worked closely with the chapter’s advisor, Lindsay Starkey, on all necessary planning and organizational tasks related to the conference, including drafting the Call for Papers, selecting participants, composing panels, and arranging for session chairs/discussants.
Phi Alpha There is a professional society whose mission is to promote the study of history through the encouragement of research, good teaching, publication, and the exchange of learning and ideas among historians. It seeks to bring students and teachers together for intellectual and social exchanges, which promote and assist historical research and publication by its members in a variety of ways. The society connects scholars at all career levels interested in history, and membership is open to students of all levels.
Since its inauguration in 1921, Phi Alpha Theta has grown to more than nine hundred chapters in all fifty states, more than any other accredited four-year college honor society. The total number of initiates since its inception exceeds five hundred thousand nationwide. Some nine thousand new members join each year. Kent State’s Psi Chapter is among the society’s oldest. Kent State MA and PhD graduate Kyriakos Nalmpantis, associate professor of history at Baldwin Wallace University in Berea, is national vice president of the society.
It was an honor for us to host the joint Ohio Academy/Phi Alpha Theta meeting, which together brought more than one hundred visitors to campus. And it was particularly fitting that incoming Ohio Academy President David Strittmatter’s poignant presidential address, “The Guardsmen Speak: Oral History & Contested Memory,” delivered at the combined conference’s luncheon, explored Ohio Northern University’s Kent State Guardsmen Oral History Project.