Sarah Stever

Why you’re going to love my class
You’re going to learn about human nature. Your knowledge of human nature comes from your own era and culture, but in my class you’ll be exposed to many different eras and cultures. And you’ll come to understand that there are all sorts of ways of thinking about things. So you’ll get a much broader perspective—which changes your very being, because it changes the way you look at the world.

Great things for you at UDM
After you’ve been introduced to history, I hope I can persuade you to come study in Italy with me. We have a study program in Italy that’s run for 20 years now. I’ll take you on field trips, where instead of seeing images on slides, you’ll actually walk around historical sites, and you’ll get to experience a foreign culture, and live in it.

“We want great things for you” means
I won’t leave you alone! You can’t just wait ’til midterms and finals to do well in my class, you’ll have to prepare for every class, for every discussion. But that’s not asking anything you can’t do. And if you do your best, then you’ll do well in my class.

You might like to know that
I just finished a book called Art, Style, and Society that came out of the summers of teaching in Italy, and trying to explain to students why cities that are so close to each other as Siena, Florence and Venice are so different.

No other professor can say to you
One of my students came and asked me to write a letter of recommendation for law school, but I persuaded him instead to go on to study history in graduate school, and he just won the National Book Award for history.