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With President Clinton still smarting from allegations of improper conduct in the White House, current presidential candidates have struggled to build firewalls between the public figure and the private person, brushing aside questions about "past peccadilloes" as irrelevant and unjustified violations of personal space.
While "no comment" is a cherished campaign ploy, the notion that politicians should be allowed to separate their public and private selves is truly a modern phenomenon, according to Derek M. Hirst, Ph.D., the William Eliot Smith Professor of History and chair of history in Arts & Sciences.
"Our ancestors were sure that the inner and the outer self were two sides of the same coin," said Hirst, a specialist in 17th-century British history. "The premodern world assumed the overlap of the public and the domestic. Everybody knew, therefore, that personal dysfunction must signal political dislocation."
And while modern scholars often find it easier to ignore the messy details of historical figures' individual concerns and motivations, Hirst has made them a central focus of his research. During the last decade, his studies have focused broadly on the meaning and consequences of the 17th-century English Revolution, but the questions he raises are often intensely personal. A faculty member here since 1975, Hirst is known for showing how cultural, societal and even individual psychological issues helped shape early-modern British history.
Hirst's research is widely respected, but his most recent foray has, he admitted, led him into dangerous academic territory. The latest in a long line of joint research conducted with Steven Zwicker, Ph.D., the Stanley Elkin Professor of English in Arts & Sciences, this provocative study explores how homosexuality shaped the life and work of 17th-century British poet and politician Andrew Marvell.
"Modern scholars tend to be squeamish about trying to relate the interior life to the public career," he noted. But the result is that historians have tended to produce overly rationalized accounts of past events and people, running the risk of seriously misinterpreting the social forces behind past events -- as in Marvell's case.
While historians have lauded Marvell as an early champion of religious tolerance and political freedom, none bothered to dig into his motivations. Hirst and Zwicker conducted an extensive review of Marvell's writings, including early work as one of Britain's most famous lyric love poets and later essays that rank among the nation's most biting political satire. Their conclusion: Marvell's fierce campaign for individual rights grew out of an inner struggle that tugged at every fiber of his personal life -- a lifelong effort to reconcile his own powerful homoerotic interests with the societal pressures of a repressive and highly patriarchal British culture.
"Derek Hirst has been a superb colleague and collaborator," Zwicker said. "The opportunity to teach and work with him has been one of the most rewarding of my academic experiences, and though we've been doing collaborative work for a long time, the possibility of exploring relationships between politics and culture, as we have done on the essays of Andrew Marvell, seems only to become more and more interesting."
Hirst and Zwicker's essay on Marvell's sexual identity and politics appeared this year in ELH, a leading journal of English cultural studies. The team, which has collaborated on interdisciplinary research for more than 20 years, also plans to co-author a book on their research in the next few years. After that Hirst intends to produce a study of the English republican experiment of the 1650s that will, among other things, explore how our modern distinction between the public and the private began.
A longtime fellow of the prestigious Royal Historical Society, Hirst centers his ongoing research on the way 17th-century England, which thought of itself in the traditional terms of the organic body politic, coped with change. Although people tended to imagine their world as a stable organism, it was in fact a time of considerable commercial change and political innovation. The fact that pornography, for example, became a powerful form of political argument in this period suggests the imaginative power of the stresses that were generated.
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Hirst grew up close to the turf he studies. The son of a grocer in the small town of Ventnor on England's Isle of Wight, he made his mark as a "scholarship boy" at one of the country's more prestigious and academically challenging "prep" schools. At age 14, he was reading John Locke and launching his first explorations of 17th-century history.
His academic success led to a scholarship to Cambridge University, where he studied under Sir John Plumb, a leading British historian and former graduate adviser to Hirst's secondary school history teacher. Hirst achieved the top-ranked undergraduate degree in history at Cambridge in 1969 and finished a doctoral degree there in 1973.
He was a fellow of Trinity Hall at Cambridge from 1971 to 1975 and director of studies in history there in 1974 and 1975. Like his mentor, he became interested in how popular culture and other contemporary influences interacted with and shaped political history.
Hirst might have been content to spend his career at Cambridge, but coincidence and his association with Plumb combined to bring him to America. Plumb also had served as a graduate adviser for Richard W. Davis, another British historian who had since become professor and chair of history at Washington University. As fate would have it, Davis asked Plumb for suggestions of promising young British historians who might be interested in faculty positions here.
"Some academics in America find it unimaginable that anyone would voluntarily move away from the comfortable surroundings of Oxbridge," Hirst said, referring to England's venerable universities. "But actually, the demands of committee work in the Oxbridge college system are huge. Lots of time and energy go to waste."
Hirst is grateful that the administration here has staff to handle many of the University's day-to-day operational matters, but the responsibilities of administration have returned to haunt him in his new role as chair of the history department.
Hirst became chair just as Arts & Sciences voted in and began implementing a new curriculum, with a renewed emphasis on interdisciplinary work. "It has forced us to rethink how our program is arranged from freshmen year through graduate school and to develop new interdisciplinary approaches to both teaching and research," Hirst said. "At the moment, it's generating a huge workload, but as someone whose own research and teaching are very interdisciplinary, I'm all for it."
Hirst's duties have included an ongoing effort to rebuild the department, which had shrunk from a staffing level of more than 20 faculty to only 15 full-time equivalent positions in 1998. Hirst has helped reverse that trend, hiring four faculty in the 1998-99 academic year and searching for two more new hires this year. Several of these new faculty have come aboard as joint appointments with other disciplines.
"For years, the history department tended to think of itself in terms of coverage -- we had to have someone in this area or that role or that period," Hirst said. "Now, as Arts & Sciences moves toward a more interdisciplinary approach, it's become clear that history is well positioned to bridge the gaps between a number of departments and programs in the humanities and social sciences."
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