Clarence Lang is the Susan Welch Dean of the College of the Liberal Arts at Penn State. The below comments were obtained shortly after the completion of his PhD.
“My experiences as a student in the Department of History had a heavy influence on my own interests and development as a scholar. Mark Leff and Sonya Michel helped to strengthen my awareness of the major themes in U.S. history, and deepened my appreciation of the centrality of social policy and the processes of the state. Harry Liebersohn and Peter Fritzsche, in their respective ways, helped expand my understanding of social theory and historiography; reading and debating the historical/biographical graphic novel Maus was one of the highlights of my course work. Working with Jim Barrett, a foremost expert in U.S. labor history, gave me a context in which to place my approach to the histories of African American working-class people inside and outside organized labor. The first-year seminar I took with him gave me the basis for my first scholarly article, published when I was still a Ph.D. student. Under the advising of Juliet E.K. Walker, one of the nation's leading black business historians, I learned to situate my black working-class focus within a broader, more holistic, framework of African American history and its complex class relations. Vernon Burton nurtured my interests in southern history and the digital humanities, while Sundiata Cha-Jua and David Roediger, both members of my dissertation committee, helped anchor me in African American Studies, and the historiography of Black Nationalism, social movements, and the multiracial left.”