‘I’ve Always Thought of Myself More as a Midwife’

By Beth McMurtrie

Keri Wiginton for The Chronicle

Kathleen Conzen (second from left), a professor emerita at the U. of Chicago, meets with former students who are now professors themselves.

When Kathleen Conzen arrived at the University of Chicago in 1976, she was the only woman in a department of 44 historians. Students immediately sought her out for advice. While she was perceived as more approachable simply because she was a woman, Ms. Conzen says, she was, in fact, quite willing to spend a lot of time with graduate students—her own and others’.

She soon gained a reputation as the go-to adviser: broadly knowledgeable, intellectually rigorous, and always supportive. “I never thought of it as taking away from my own work, but in adding to my work,” she says of her advising. “By asking questions of where someone else is going with their work, you’re also thinking creatively yourself.”

Ms. Conzen, a specialist in 19th-century American social and political history, retired in 2011, but her impact on the field of history has been profound. She was even the subject of a daylong symposium at the Newberry Library, in Chicago, during which her mentorship was highlighted.

“There aren’t enough superlatives to describe Kathy,” says Kathleen A. Brosnan, a history professor at the University of Oklahoma, who earned her doctorate at Chicago and helped organize the symposium. “Maybe her greatest gift is that she doesn’t inject her own ego in the process. She’s certainly proud of her students but doesn’t claim their success as her own.”

Her admirers say Ms. Conzen has the ability to cultivate her students’ intellectual interests through incisive questioning, while subtly helping them navigate their careers. In her case, Ms. Brosnan says her former professor gently steered her away from an offer at a university that would not have been a good fit. Instead Ms. Conzen arranged for Ms. Brosnan to teach a course at Chicago while polishing her dissertation. That led to nine interviews, two job offers, and a position at a top research university.

Another of Ms. Conzen’s former graduate students, Barbara Welke, a history professor at the University of Minnesota, remembers her mentor’s sharp analysis of her work. “She models an inquiring mind. She asked questions as opposed to telling me what she thought it was all about.” Ms. Conzen says that’s simply her style. She doesn’t actually like the word “mentor,” as it implies she has “protégés,” a relationship that can be suffocating. “I’ve never tried to set myself up as an authority but rather somebody whom people can talk things through with,” she says. “I’ve always thought of myself more as a midwife.”