Alumni Spotlight: Brian Payne, PhD History
A Conversation with Brian Payne
As the academic job market for historians has grown increasingly competitive, PhDs who have more recently obtained tenure-track teaching positions at colleges and universities often play an important, if sometimes subtle, role within the life of history departments across the United States. Drawing from recent experience to serve as de facto career mentors, those who maintain connections to their alma mater provide a critical roadmap to success for new graduate students, who will likely be entering a vastly different career environment than that of their advisors and other senior scholars. Environmental historian Brian Payne is one such alumnus, who has both directly and indirectly served as a role model for University of Maine history graduate students.
Payne earned his PhD from the University of Maine in 2006 after successfully defending his dissertation, entitled “Fishing a Borderless Sea: Environmental Territorialism in the North Atlantic, 1871–1910,” which was published as a monograph by Michigan State University in 2010. He has authored numerous articles on the maritime history of New England and Atlantic Canada, covering topics ranging from fisheries regulation and stewardship to labor systems within the region’s fish processing industry. He has also collaborated extensively with other scholars, having helped found the organization, Northeast Atlantic Region Environmental History—or, NEAR–EH. His current projects include Editing the Ocean: The Culture and Politics of Seafood Consumption in Canada, 1900–1950 and The Gulf Between Us: An Environmental History of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the latter of which is a co-edited volume and is under contract with McGill–Queen’s University Press. He is an associate professor of history at Bridgewater State University (BSU) and was recently presented with an award from the U.S. Fulbright Foundation for Educational Exchange Between Canada and the United States, which has allowed him to engage in a solid year of concentrated research from September 2016 to August 2017 at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.
By serving as an example through his numerous scholarly successes and through direct engagement with graduate students and other junior scholars via organizations, such as NEAR–EH, Brian Payne is one of the many UMaine history alumni whose post-graduate work continues to have a multiplier effect, returning dividends to the department years after having earned his degree.
Originally from Youngstown, New York, Payne cultivated an early love of history while attending St. John Fisher College during the mid-to-late 1990s and working at Fort Niagara, which was built by the French in 1726 and continued to have strategic relevance during a number of historic international conflicts. According to Payne, it was here that he had his “first opportunity to really think about history—what history we decide to celebrate, how we tell stories about the past, and how history can continue to shape our world.” During his undergraduate studies, his interest of history matured from a fascination with stories about the past to a desire to participate in debates about the past. “I wanted to be a part of shaping that collective narrative of how we see ourselves,” says Payne of these formative years.
After obtaining his BA in history in 1998, Payne came to the University of Maine, earning his MA (also in history) in 2001 before transitioning into the PhD program. During this time, he worked closely with his advisor, Scott See, who is a borderlands historian. Payne says that he chose the history graduate program at UMaine because of its strong emphasis on US–Canadian history. Payne explains this interest by stressing that he grew up a block from the Canadian border, which shaped his understanding of history from an early age.
Though Payne’s research interests shifted somewhat after joining he program, he described UMaine as a “great place” for him to pursue his work. He continues to speak highly of his professors, stating, “The faculty at UMaine . . . provided me enough guidance to help me along the way but gave me plenty of freedom to explore the topics I wanted to from the angles I wanted to. People provided me with plenty of advice, but no one told me what to do. That worked well for me.” He also describes a program in which faculty, especially his advisor, emphasized the importance of a “hard work ethic”:
We learned the same set of theoretical and methodical ideas and did the same kind of readings and research one might do at any program, but . . . UMaine graduate students have to work to make their own names for themselves. There was a kind of working-class academic feel to the place. No one sat idle. Scott and others always pushed us to present papers at conferences, write grant applications, seek publications, and get teaching experience, all of which had to be earned by our own merit and not by the school’s reputation. These were all crucial to success on the job market.
Payne’s experiences at UMaine also helped prepare him for BSU, which is a teaching-focused school with a writing-intensive curriculum that demands a great deal from its faculty as well as its students. However, with high demand comes high reward, says Payne, who has an opportunity to focus on the needs of students by helping them to engage in critical analysis of texts and interpretation of source materials and to better articulate their views. Though he is always adjusting and refining his strategy in the classroom, Payne’s goals as an educator can be summed up as an attempt to “construct an environment, both in and out of the classroom, that allows students to comfortably explore the unknown, challenge their preconceived ideas, and speak freely about their views in constructive ways.” Like many faculty, he also dedicates himself to various forms of academic service, including a two-year term as faculty union president, which included both additional academic and administrative duties.
Payne’s full teaching load and academic service responsibilities have created challenges for him in terms of meeting his writing and research goals, challenges which are probably all too familiar for junior faculty at many institutions of higher learning today. However, he manages to make time for scholarly pursuits during the summer and during small reprieves, such as his recent Fulbright award. During his time in Ottawa, for example, he spent most days working in the National Library and Archives of Canada and has written a book manuscript, which is under review with McGill–Queen’s University Press. He has also completed additional research and has written two article-length manuscripts, revised two existing articles and an essay for his co-edited volume, and begun an entirely new project. His Fulbright has also provided him with an opportunity to “think more broadly about just what it is [he wants] to do as a researcher and where [he wants] to go as [he enters] a new stage in [his] career.” Moving beyond the scholarly pursuits he cultivated as a graduate student, he says that he is now “becoming more interested in food policy” and “[wants] to more deeply engage contemporary debates about nutritional policies and food aid.” He hopes to bring a crucial “historical perspective” to this topic, raising new, more provocative questions.
While the workload and challenges Payne has faced as a junior faculty member differs from that of many of his colleagues, who benefited from a wave of post–World War II enthusiasm for investment in higher education, they aren’t unique for tenured faculty today. As such, Payne serves as an important model for up-and-coming history scholars at the University of Maine, to whom he offers the following piece of advice:
UMaine graduate students can successfully compete for jobs and grants if they’re willing to do the hard work that will set them apart from the others. You’ve got to get out there and engage with the community: present papers, publish reviews and articles, and get teaching experience. The work will pay off in the end.
This article was originally published in the History Department News semi-annual newsletter and written by Eileen Hagerman.
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