After graduating from Yale only a year ago, history professor Michael Blaakman recently completed his first semester teaching at St. Thomas.

“I decided to come here because I wanted to be at a place that valued teaching,” Blaakman said. “It seemed to me when I was interviewing that St. Thomas was a place that was looking for somebody whose scholarship could enrich their classroom presence.”

Blaakman is originally from Rochester, New York, and attended the College of William and Mary for his undergraduate degree. After getting his bachelor’s degree and before entering graduate school, Blaakman decided to try out teaching to see if he wanted to pursue a career in education.

“I went to Slovakia on a Fulbright English teaching grant,” Blaakman said. “I knew that I wanted to become a historian when I was an undergraduate student, but I wasn’t sure whether or not I wanted to teach. I figured I’ll do a thing that will allow me to get out of my comfort zone a little bit and will also allow me to figure out if teaching is the career path for me.”

In Slovakia, Blaakman taught English language conversation classes to undergraduate students and a graduate student seminar about American culture.

“It was so different from anything I had ever experienced before,” Blaakman said. “I did a lot of traveling, met a lot of fun interesting people, learned a lot about myself and learned that I did love teaching.”

Blaakman first got into history to help preserve the collective memory of the nation, motivated by his own lapses in memory.

“I have the world’s worst memory,” Blaakman said. “Part of the reason why I became a historian was to try and work against it. What if the world had as bad a memory as I do? What a disaster that would be. A career in which I tried to contribute to our collective memory seemed to me like a worthwhile way to spend a career.”

This semester, Blaakman taught three sections of HIST 113, Early American/Global Perspective. He takes a special interest in the origins of the United States.

“My passion is figuring out how our nation was founded and why it was founded the way it was,” Blaakman said. “I think there’s lessons to be drawn from that in terms of guidance for what kinds of political decisions we should make, how we should think about the nation’s future or how we think about American values.”

Blaakman is currently working on a book about the rush to claim real estate during the early stages of America, and has plans to write biographies of Martha Bradstreet and John Graves Simcoe, two people whose stories have not yet been told by many other historians.

Solveig Rennan can be reached at renn6664@stthomas.edu.