Alumni & Voices

Alan Rogers

Dr. Rogers is Professor of History at Boston College.

I have wonderful memories of the eight months that my wife and I Spent in Jakarta in 1989 and of the important intellectual links able to forge with my colleagues in the American Studies program at UI. I’m especially grateful to Ibu Nana Soeyono and Bapak Parsudi, whose hospitality and vitality made my transition from Boston College to the University of Indonesia practically effortless. My chief responsibility was to teach two courses in American history: a survey from the Civil War through the New Deal and a course on the American Revolution and the Constitution. I also directed the theses of several students. Among them was one on New Deal economic policy, another on efforts to reform American education and a third on race and politics.

Because my own academic specialties are Early America and the Constitution. I didn’t really benefit directly from the time I spent in Indonesia. But the shape of one of the courses I teach at Boston College has changed markedly. Rather than focusing only on the history of Western Europe, I now include topics on the development of a world market system and feature prominently the long relationship between the Dutch and Indonesia. I want to encourage my students to take a world view and go beyond a parochial Western perspective.

We returned to Boston With a kaleidoscope of brightly colored memories: walking around Samosir Island on Lake Toba, strolling through a huge open market in Bukittingi, getting soaked while shopping in the rain for orchids in Mentang learning to harvest rice in Bali, watching the Ramayana epic for four nights in a row at the Prambanan temple, browsing through small shops where men and women make batik, walking barefoot across the cool marble floors of our pavilion and (best of all) the smiling faces of all our Indonesian friends.

This article appears from the book of U.S Indonesian Fulbright Program – Forty Years of Scholarships and Mutual Understanding 1952 – 1992 (pages 35 – 42 ) published in 1992.

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