Meet The Faculty: Graham Peck
Welcome to our series of news stories about our faculty. Throughout the year, you'll get to learn about their interests and any other interesting facts about themselves that they like to share.
Graham Peck is the Wepner Distinguished Professor of Lincoln Studies at UIS. He is a California native and was raised by English immigrant parents. Peck earned his B.A. in History from CSU Hayward and his M.A. and Ph.D. in American History from Northwestern University. He joined UIS in 2019. We asked him a few questions to learn more about him!
How did you discover your love of history?
I was not a child who constantly had a history book in my hand. When I was younger, I preferred reading fantasy and science fiction, playing video games, playing tennis, and playing with my friends generally. Only when I got to college, when I declared a history major, did I start getting more invested in history. And then when I went to graduate school at Northwestern for my PhD, the investment deepened appreciably. Eventually, I became a historian, and then a professor, both entirely unexpected and still very surprising developments.
What do you like most about teaching at UIS?
I love the small classes that enable me to get to know students. I try to learn the names of every student in the first week, and mostly I am successful. I also like that the university has a lot of first generation students, like myself. I try to give students good advice for navigating the university and developing future careers.
What research interests/publications/conferences/etc. are you currently working towards?
I’m working on The Selected Speeches of Stephen A. Douglas. It will be the first modern edition of Douglas’ speeches. It is under contract with the University of Illinois Press. Hopefully I will submit the draft of the book to the press this year. It will have about 20 speeches from Douglas’ career, and it should be around 600 pages.
What advice can you give to students about History as a field of study?
I would suggest that they take a wide range of courses to expose themselves to as many different time periods and subjects as possible. Comparative history is extremely difficult for scholars to do, but reading broadly is both possible and very illuminating. Doing so reveals both the enormous variety of human societies and some of the profound similarities in the human condition across time and space.
If you could have lunch with any historical figure, who would you choose and why?
As a Lincoln scholar I suppose I should say Abraham Lincoln, but I would be fascinated to speak with any number of people from the past. Also, Lincoln was famously shut-mouthed, a characteristic of many highly successful politicians, so he probably would have entertained me without revealing very much! He was also famous for making people laugh, and using laughter to change the subject. So I’d probably be better off picking someone else if my intention was to pick their brain.
Anything more you would like to share?
Our family had two dogs as a child. The second was really my dog. I took care of him from approximately the age of 10 to 20. His name was Tiger, because he had dark stripes down his sides. He was a brindle boxer, and a wonderful companion.