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Writing-Intensive Courses
ENC 1101H, ENC 1102H, AMH 2010, AMH 2020, EUH
2000H, EUH 2001H, HIS 4150 History and Historians, AML 3031 American Literature
I, AMH 3930H Captivity and the National Imagination, AMH 4311 American
Culture I, AML 4304 Whitman and His Heirs, EUH 3142 Renaissance and Reformation,
Honors in the Major
Special Interests
My academic interests cover United States intellectual
history broadly with focuses on Puritanism, pragmatism, American literary
history, New England culture, the history of higher education, American
historiography and the philosophy of history, the history and philosophy of science,
liberalism, and American Studies. I love attending academic conferences,
presenting and observing. For fun, I like canoeing and kayaking, visiting art
museums, listening to the UCF jazz band and chamber orchestra, and seeing movies
with friends at Regal or the Enzian. Of course, my favorite interests are
writing and, separately, reading everything from The New York Times to The
Chronicle of Higher Education and from novels to history books.
Thomas on Writing
My writing philosophy directly reflects my academic
interests in American Puritanism and pragmatism. Like the Puritans, I have
always considered writing a rather autobiographical endeavor. All of my
writing reflects my life and thought at a given time. I believe the written/spoken
word requires great care and attention because it provides our only means of
bringing temporary order to a chaotic and complex world. This order, in no
way objective, always reflects the writing’s context. As a historian, I strive
for objectivity while realizing that complete objectivity and
disinterestedness are impossible achievements. Subjectivity haunts us all as long as we
remain human. As an intellectual historian, I write with the intent of bridging
the gap between thought and act, bringing meaning and interpretation to a
world in which facts fail to speak for themselves. Like any good pragmatist, my
writing also serves a personal purpose, exploring the depths of my mind, its
internal world, and its interaction with the external world. The American
Puritans believed that one should never separate aesthetics from practice and
purpose. No matter how lofty the flights of writing as literary art, the writer
must always take care that his/her writing remains firmly grounded in the
temporal. For me, one must never treat literature as an end in itself. It always
serves the purposes of the historian or its readers whose purposes, in turn,
hopefully serve some higher purpose.
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