About the Center
The Nicholas D. Chabraja Center for Historical Studies activities are enabled by a generous endowment from Northwestern alum and member of the university's board of trustees Nick CHABRAJA and his wife Eleanor. The Serbian name Chabraja is pronounced "Tcha-BRAH-yah."
In October 2022 we belatedly (due to the Covid pandemic) celebrated the Center's 15th anniversary with a festive lunch and Prof. Henry Binford's lecture on the historical importance of ice cream (and yes, there was ice cream cake!). We are continuing an annual "Ice Cream Lecture" at the start of the academic year, at which a Northwestern historian gives a lecture on a broad topic of public interest. Have a look at our events.
Our Center associates—Chabraja Postdoctoral Fellows and the graduate T.H. Breen Fellows and Quinn Fellow—teach History courses, conduct archival and digital research, and help organize conferences and workshops. Our undergraduate Leopold Fellowship program is consistently popular and we have 23 Leopold Fellows working with History faculty on projects pertaining to the professors' research.
The Center not only fosters academic excellence but also an interest in public history and historians' work outside the academy. Besides our annual Chabraja Teaching Postdoctoral Fellows, we also have Chabraja Public History Postdoctoral Fellows who work for non-profit organizations in Chicagoland and beyond. In the summer we fund several graduate students working on a slew of public history projects.
Each academic year CCHS hosts:
- four to five public lunch lectures featuring distinguished and emerging scholars
- jointly organized major public lectures, such as NU Libraries/CCHS lecture on the History of the Book, a lecture in collaboration with the university's Holocaust Educational Foundation (HEFNU), a distinguished speaker lecture with the Center for African American History (CAAH), and the Gray Boyce Memorial Lecture in Medieval History (in collaboration with the History Department)
- public conferences
- global exchanges for graduate students with the School of History at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL)
- an ongoing History Department faculty work-in-progress workshop series
- other events, such as annual receptions celebrating new books published by Northwestern historians; public lectures by eminent and emerging historians; public panel discussions on the role of history today; and lectures
especially designed to help graduate students deal with professional challenges.
CCHS also co-sponsors additional history activities on campus—see Co-
The blog Forays into the Past, and a number of filmed interviews and podcasts with guest speakers and History faculty are available at Multimedia.
PostDoctoral Fellows:
The Center community is now strengthened by the Chabraja Postdoctoral Fellows competitively selected from among recent NU History PhDs. Two Chabraja Fellows teach courses in the History Department and participate in CCHS activities. In 2018-19 the first Chabraja Postdoctoral Fellowship in Public History/Service was established, allowing new historians to engage in public history at a non-profit institution, preferably in the Chicago area. In 2023-24 and 2025-26 our postdocs were joined by a Postdoctoral Fellow in Material History, working in the Material History Lab.
Graduate Students:
The Center has much to offer graduate students in History. Each year the Center selects several graduate Fellows to form part of the CCHS community of scholars: the T.H. Breen Graduate Fellows and the Doris G. Quinn Fellow. Center Fellows help organize our faculty conferences; engage with Center global graduate exchanges; maintain the Center digital and social media presence; provide mentorship to the undergraduate Leopold Fellows. The fellowships are named after the Center's founding director, eminent colonial American historian, Timothy Hall Breen. The Quinn Fellow joins Center associates under joint CCHS and Doris G. Quinn Foundation auspices.
In association with non-profit institutions in Chicago, Evanston and elsewhere the Center sponsors graduate summer research projects (see Graduate Fellowships).
An innovative program of global exchanges (international doctoral workshops) was initiated by the Center in 2008 and has included events in Ireland, Germany, Italy, Poland, Turkey, and Hong Kong. We now have an ongoing graduate exchange with Queen Mary University of London (QMUL).
Undergraduate Students:
For undergraduates (both History majors and across the university) the CCHS Leopold Fellowship program offers the opportunity and means to work closely with primary historical materials under the guidance of faculty, doing actual archival faculty research and learning how to transform raw data into historical interpretation. The first group of ten undergraduate 2008-2009 Leopold Fellows has grown to 20-40, depending Honn the academic year. The program has proven popular with faculty and undergrads, both History majors and others. The Center has hosted Leopold Fellows from the College of Arts and Sciences, as well as the Schools of Journalism (Medill), Education (SESP), Communication, and Music, working on a wide range of projects in English and other languages.
In 2018 the Center initiated a new undergraduate course development grant for senior History faculty to create new classes aimed at non-History majors. The first course was taught by Professor Scott Sowerby and graduate student Youjia Li on "Pirates, Guns and Empire" in the Spring 2019 quarter, while in 2020 Professor Dyan Elliott offered a prescient Winter Quarter course on "The Black Death and Other Pandemics" with Marcos Leitao De Almeida. The Teaching Initiative is ongoing and this year's classes can be found here.
The Northwestern campus sits on the traditional homelands of the people of the Council of Three Fires, the Ojibwe, Potawatomi, and Odawa as well as the Menominee, Miami and Ho-Chunk nations. It was also a site of trade, travel, gathering and healing for more than a dozen other Native tribes and is still home to over 100,000 tribal members in the state of Illinois.