Professor Profile: Peter Winn
February 11, 2005
When Peter Winn, a professor of history with an emphasis on Latin America, spoke of going to the old, reconstructed section of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, where Columbus first landed, to get a feel for what it was like 500 years ago, he said he visited at night, when the “modern accretions” weren’t so visible in the dark. Winn spoke in a soft, studied way; his responses to interview questions for this article formed whole paragraphs. On the day of the interview, his pants, turtleneck, and sweater all were purple.
That visit to Santo Domingo was part of research for his role as academic, or content, director for a PBS series called Americas that aired in 1993, and an accompanying book that now serves as a text in the Americas class that Winn teaches in the fall at Tufts. He traveled to over 20 countries in a short time for the PBS project, not just to conduct interviews, “but to see the scenery, to be able to give descriptions of what it’s like … I try to bring the reader there,” he said.
Winn’s Americas book is a general history of Latin America and the Caribbean, including an exploration of its culture and the area’s relationship with the United States. Winn called the book “an example of a number of things coming together that probably would not be considered traditional history,” including the use of oral histories, which “have the capacity to become the voice of the voiceless.” In all of his work, Winn said that he tries to “give the sense of history itself as a much more diverse process, including the experiences of people no one’s ever heard of.” His other books include Weavers of Revolution: The Yarur Workers and Chile’s Road to Socialism and Victims of the Chilean Miracle: Workers and Neoliberalism in the Pinochet Era, 1973-2002.
Latin America was actually the last area of the world that Winn became interested in through formal research, though he had always followed events in the region and felt an affinity for its culture. He graduated from Columbia in 1962, and went on to earn a PhD from Cambridge in 1972. While at Cambridge, Winn was studying “what the English called the expansion of Europe and what everyone else called imperialism.” He was focusing on the history of Asia and Africa and the interactions of the Europeans who went there, but eventually his teachers pointed out to him that a lot was known about those regions but very little was known about expansion’s effect on Latin America at the time. This encouraged Winn to do his doctoral dissertation on Britain and Latin America, and that led to his specific focus on Latin America.
This spring at Tufts, in addition to teaching a research seminar on Brazil and Argentina and participating in a graduate colloquium on film and history, Winn is launching a course on the history of globalization that he says goes back to his original research interest, “with this notion of global history and the interactions between countries,” he said. The survey course is being conducted with a smaller class this spring and will be offered to a larger group of students in the fall.
“Historians feel that globalization is a watch-word that everyone’s talking about,” Winn said. “People seem to feel that it began in the 1990s, and in fact one way to understand the history of the modern world is a history, a process, by which the very separate regions of the world became increasingly intertwined over the last half millennium.”
Winn envisions the globalization seminar not only as a basic course in the history department, but “as a kind of core-requirement-type course for International Relations as well.” He mentioned the debate among historians about why Europe industrialized first when China had all of the necessary ingredients for industrialization around the same time as Europe. Winn said that China always thought of itself as the “middle kingdom,” and that “the twenty-first century looks as if it might very well be China’s century.” The globalization seminar will examine issues like that from a non-Eurocentric perspective.
“One of my favorite quotes is that ‘facts are like sacks,’” said Winn, meaning that facts do not stand up until something is put into them, and what is put into them is interpretation. For this reason, he tries to get his students to view everything critically. Even the way questions are pursued is based in interpretation. “Each generation asks different questions and interprets the past in light of new concerns,” said Winn.
He readily admitted that he brings his own views into his teaching, and feels that “teaching is an extension of oneself.” He compared teaching to parenting, in the sense that a teacher must be comfortable with his or her own style to be effective. But because everything is interpretation, Winn said, he tries to make clear that what he says, what his students read, and what they see on the screen are just views. He’s witnessed that students are often less inclined to be critical of what they watch on a screen than of what they read in books.
This is one of the topics discussed in the graduate colloquium on film and history, a class that contains a mixture of film students from the Museum School and history graduate students. Winn has personally experienced the way that history’s portrayal on film can become controversial. When he was working on the Americas series for WGBH in Boston, he and other advisors to the project took issue with the way one of the films depicted the Shining Path guerilla movement in Peru, which caused thousands of deaths, because the film-maker was sympathetic to the movement. Winn felt that the film showed “the context of the Shining Path only in the way that the Shining Path wanted it to be shown,” making it “a propaganda film.” The controversy made The Boston Globe, and, as a result, multiple cuts of the film exist. In some the narration is different, but the actual images are the same in each version, which Winn said is a problem because images are so powerful. “Academics don’t understand that because we’re text people,” he said.
Winn became involved in film when he was writing journalistic pieces about Mariel refugees from Cuba in 1980. He was contacted by a film director who, while vacationing in Key West, had seen boats and boats of refugees coming in and immediately called a film crew from New York. The director got great footage and interviews, but needed to understand the material, and felt that Winn’s articles best explained what was going on. Beyond the Sea was nominated for an Academy Award.
It has been over two decades since Winn came to Tufts. Before that he taught at Princeton and Yale, and said that he’s seen the overall quality of Tufts students rise since coming here. “National rankings become self-fulfilling,” he said. “Tufts has been on a virtuous circle … I’m not just talking about grades but about engagement, intellectual quality, and level of discussion.” Winn said that Tufts’s medium-sized history department has grown somewhat since he came here, and noted its international focus as “the hallmark of the department.” In his own classes, he wants students to understand the diversity within Latin America, the ways in which it has contributed to literature and popular culture, and the area’s complicated relationship with the United States. He pointed to the fact that Brazil has the fourth-largest population and the eighth-largest economy in the world.
The international focus that Winn cited in the history department fits in well with Tufts’ goal of creating what he called “global citizens for a globalized world.” This message is part of what attracts students to Tufts. But, Winn said, “I think the risk is that it remains at the level of rhetoric.” Winn is advisor to the Tufts-in-Chile program, and tries to encourage students to do internships while abroad in Chile because he thinks they might learn more through that experience than through their regular classes in the country. And he grades those internships because he believes that makes students take them seriously. Winn noted that 40 percent of Tufts undergraduates and 70 percent of International Relations majors study abroad.
His concern with study abroad is that “too often, it’s not fully integrated into what students have studied before they go, and also not integrated into what they study when they come back.” Winn called himself one of several people on campus who think it is important that students not only go abroad to learn about a country, but travel with the goal of doing research for an independent study or senior honors thesis. He does not want study abroad to be looked at as a separate, isolated experience, but said that, “I’m not sure if student culture is caught up to that, for all the talk. I don’t get a sense that it has been raised as widespread as the administration might like.” When Winn was at Princeton, all students were required to do a senior thesis. “I don’t think it’s for everybody,” he said, but felt that a lot of Tufts students who would benefit from doing a thesis do not. He also feels that what he called “the culture of academic credentialing,” or the way many students aim for double majors, might keep students from taking classes they are interested in and from gaining depth. Winn was quick to argue that double majors will not lead to better job prospects. “The important thing to employers is the skills you graduate with, rather than the credentials: how to read, write, and think critically,” he said.
When not absorbed in academic life at Tufts, Winn said he is what New Yorkers call a “culture vulture.” He enjoys cooking and eating good food, traveling, concerts, the theater, and opera. His advice to students? “Unplug,” he said with a smile. “It’s like…Isn’t there ‘MTV Unplugged’ now?…Sometimes you really just need to unplug.”
