Profile for Tiffany Trimmer

Brief biography

Whatever career path they want to pursue, every person needs to be able to:

• understand complex causes and effects…and explain how they shape present circumstances

• understand how local/personal experiences are related to regional/global trends

• make their own ideas understood by choosing the most relevant, and persuasive, evidence

Studying history gives you the intellectual tool kit to master these daily life survival skills.

For me, teaching a history class means focusing on both historical content and the practical skills necessary to make sense of the knowledge about the past a person has gained. Here are some of the main skills you can expect to practice with me as a student: tracing connections and patterns of interactions over time and across geographical space; making meaningful historical comparisons; having an accurate command of the broad outlines of historical chronology and content; being able to use what is known about the historical context of a primary or secondary source and its author to draw appropriate conclusions; asking clear historical questions that can actually be answered; constructing evidence-based arguments about the past.

I was trained as a world historian, which means that my research focuses on how local, regional, and world-scale historical trends intersect and feed off of each other. Long-distance labor migration is the thing that most fascinates me as a historian -- it is a process that is simultaneously massive (millions of people emigrating each year) and intimately personal (each migrant, family, community having to figure out how to adjust to separation).