Dr. Jeff Richard Schutts

Welcome to my personal beachhead into the Digital Age.

I am Jeff Richard Schutts, an American historian of Modern Germany who has been living/teaching in Vancouver, Canada, for over twenty years. Before that, I grew up in a small town in Illinois, went to college in Boston, served in Germany as a US Army officer, became a “conscientious objector” and peace activist, returned to graduate school in Boise, Idaho, and then did my Ph.D in History at Georgetown.

If you do the math that puts me “over the hill” with a good start down the other side.

While my teenage son is quick to note, “OK, Boomer,” with a historian’s attention to analytical detail, I maintain I am “Cusper” – a small demographic category between the Baby Boomers and Generation X that didn’t get the perks of the former or was ever as “hip” as the later.  In any case, now simply baffled by the world around me (Brexit, Trump as president, pandemic mask-wearing as “political”?!), I decided it was overdue I engaged with the 21st century.

This website manifests a rowboat trying to catch up with the Digital Age launched years ago (e.g., to my son’s amusement, the primary use of my iPhone is to, well, make phone calls.)   

desk

It was created during the pandemic semester Fall 2020 as a Seneca College student project (i.e. free labor) of Sherin Fernando, whose developing skills and patience bested my crazy ideas and computer luddism. A work in progress, it is a public/private stock-taking of what I have accomplished in my life/career. It so doing, it shows that promising scholarly activity was quieted over the last decade. In part this was because of typical demands facing middle-aged academics – the joys/challenges of parenthood and keeping up on the treadmill of a teaching college, but there also was quite a bit of unexpected life-static: divorce, a car accident, and the loss of what Bob Dylan termed “precious time” in a nightmare relationship with what I thought was my Traumfrau. 

Regrouping here in cyberspace, I share some of my on-going projects: 1) my “pet” course at Douglas College, H 1180: Film & History. It is the department’s introductory historiography/methods class where the “history of history” is made sexy by reviewing how films have rehearsed the spotlighted historical case studies. Here you find the beginnings of an interactive timeline where students can see the breadth of topics covered; 2) a page devoted to “War & Peace” which makes available, and contextualizes, my first academic work on a Vietnam-era GI Movement coffeehouse; and 3) an overview of “Coca-Cola History”, my open-ended effort to make sense of so-called “Americanization”, corporate capitalism, and a world defined by “spin.”

I hope you enjoy your visit.

Please leave feedback or let me know what you think via email: jeff.schutts@gmail.com.

Take care,

Jeff

15 December 2020