The University announced the establishment of the Mackauer Professorship, a title which honors former University professor Christian W. Mackauer, on December 29. The professorship was sponsored by a donation by Glenn Swogger Jr. (A.B. ’57) of the Redbud Foundation.

Mackauer was a William Rainey Harper Professor of History and taught from the 1940s until 1970. He developed the History of Western Civilization course in the late 1940s with a group of several other historians, and the sequence was eventually incorporated into the College’s Core Civilization Studies curriculum.

According to a University press release, Mackauer was very influential in the establishment of the Core. The news release said that “Mackauer…powerfully articulated the mission of general education and its connections and tensions with more specialized knowledge.” The Mackauer Professorship honors professors in the College and Division of Social Sciences who foster creative thought and promote an intellectual foundation in the Core.

John D. Kelly of the Department of Anthropology has been named the first Christian W. Mackauer Professor. Aside from teaching in the College, Kelly has done research in Fiji and India on a range of issues from historical rituals to capitalism. His most recent book, Represented Communities: Fiji and World Decolonization, co-written with Martha Kaplan, analyzes the formation of nation-states from empires.