Faculty exchange bridges the Atlantic

King's College London's Dr Jim Bjork swaps views of the Thames for the leafy campuses of North Carolina for a Faculty exchange with our partner university, UNC-Chapel Hill

In autumn 2015 Dr Jim Bjork, senior lecturer in the Department of History, spent a term leading two courses at UNC-Chapel Hill in modern Central-East European history, while fellow historian, Professor Sarah Shields, brought the US perspective on the Palestine-Israel conflict to students at King’s.

This was the first faculty exchange to come out of the UNC-King’s Strategic Alliance, which originated in 2005 between King’s School of Arts & Humanities and School of Social Science & Public Policy and UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences. The alliance is one of the most ambitious partnerships between a US and UK university, including longstanding and emerging joint activity in teaching, research, student exchanges and other initiatives in diverse fields across both universities.

“The sense of connection and knowledge between the two department communities is getting deeper and deeper,” said Dr Adam Sutcliffe, head of the Department of History at King’s College London. “The [faculty] exchange is a kind of glue bringing the two communities together.”
 
Classrooms on both sides of the Atlantic were filled.
 
“We have 60 students on that module,” Sutcliffe said of Shields’ course. “It’s actually been unprecedented for a module of that type."
 
Students at King’s said the perspective of an American lecturer is what compelled them to take Shields’ course: they were learning from someone who had this history engrained in their own culture and experience.  
 
“It helps to have this American view because Sarah was around [the United States] during events like Camp David or the Oslo Accords,” said second-year student Georgia Adebowale. “She has a direct line to those events that perhaps a British lecturer otherwise wouldn’t have. Memory is a very important part of history.”
 
Bjork and Shields agreed that teaching in a new environment made travelling abroad a great experience. Each also took away their own unique experiences- which they hope colleagues will share in future exchanges.
 
“It was really interesting to me that we all write histories in particular ways, but it was really helpful to learn from the students how they’ve learned history. How they’ve learned this [Palestine-Israel conflict] history,” Shields said.
 
While Shields’ revelations came inside the classroom, Bjork said it was time with colleagues outside the classroom at Carolina that will inspire him to share fresh ideas back home at King’s.
 
“It’s been a nice group of colleagues to get to know a little better,” Bjork said. “Particularly how the department organizes events internally to support research- that has been an inspiration,” Bjork said.
 
Another faculty exchange is now in the works.

Watch UNC-Chapel Hill's video about the exchange on YouTube.