Touring "the Landscape of the Past"

Inside the classroom, Associate History Professor Mary Kelley is one of Dartmouth's most sought-after teachers. Outside, she is a nationally recognized scholar. In 1984 she was part of a prestigious group of American academics chosen to visit the People's Republic of China, and the same year The New York Times called her book on female best-selling novelists of the nineteenth century "provocative and challenging."

She encourages students to think like scholars—as she puts it, to "immerse themselves in the landscape of the past." "They are not passive recipients of historical interpretation," says Kelley, a co-chair of the Women's Studies Program who teaches courses in American intellectual and cultural history. "They, too, are historians, producing the interpretations."

Mary Kelley, who teaches courses in American cultural history, expects students to interpret as they learn.