Franklin Doeringer believes there is a great future to be found in the past, thanks to revolutionary opportunities the Internet offers students and faculty through electronic archives and journals that provide desk-top access to materials in the world's best libraries.
As editor of the history section of Merlot, a national project to develop a peer-review service for academically useful Web sites, and author of Doing History, the Lawrence history department's site, Doeringer puts into practice his belief that students no longer have to be content to learn what happened in history; they can "do history" themselves, finding and interpreting the documents and artifacts that reveal the past directly.
Clionautics, a new course required of history majors, seeks to give students the basic skills to navigate history on their own, including the ability to read and interpret historical documents. That "do-it-yourself" theme also runs through a two-volume textbook Doeringer co-authored with Kenneth Curtis, '80, of California State University, and others, titled Discovering the Global Past, and through The Global Century, a course he developed with Michael Hittle, professor of history.
In addition to being a professor of history, Doeringer is the Nathan M. Pusey Professor of East Asian Studies and a key member of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures since its establishment in 1989. In 2000-2001, he co-taught with Takakazu Kuriyama, the Stephen Edward Scarff Memorial Visiting Professor, a course on Japanese-American relations. This summer he taught in Lawrence's Summer Institute, helping high school teachers develop courses to prepare students for a new advanced placement world history exam.
He also is a board member of the Outagamie Historical Museum, where the photograph on this page was taken.