Statement on Community Engagement and Belonging
Department of History | December 15, 2025
The Department of History at Baylor University is committed to promoting community and belonging in our academic and professional community. This includes undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and staff. Through our teaching, mentoring, service, and research, we seek to foster an environment that nurtures and abides by these values. We celebrate differences among individuals, families, and communities, and we believe that this kind of understanding is central to our mission.
As people of faith, we repudiate injustice as antithetical to the character of the God we serve and contradictory to the idea of humanity as created in God’s own image. As educators whose classrooms and pedagogies all look differently, yet each seeks to enrich the intellectual and spiritual lives of our students, we commit to personal reflection on how our own scholarly and classroom practices might perpetuate divisions rather than address, confront, and/or actively work against them. As members of the Baylor community, we welcome voices historically unseen and unheard. We recognize the need to listen to, learn from, and value the experiences of all people, and we pledge to do the hard work needed to make our department and campus a place that does so as well.
To that end, the Department of History seeks to support, include, affirm, and respect all of its members as people and scholars. To accomplish this, we must be reflective and willing to engage in courageous conversations both in and outside of the classroom. In 2021, the Department established the Robert Gilbert Memorial Endowed Scholarship in History, which recognizes the importance of diversity at Baylor University by honoring Robert L. Gilbert as Baylor's first Black American graduate. This endowed scholarship was established to support students enrolled in the College of Arts & Sciences, with preference given to students who are pursuing a major in history and come from a wide range of communities and backgrounds historically underrepresented at Baylor University, including low-income and first generation.
We also stand by Baylor’s Land Acknowledgement and respectfully acknowledge that Baylor University in Waco and its original campus in Independence are on the land and territories originally occupied by Indigenous peoples including the Waco and Tawakoni of the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes, the Tonkawa, the Nʉmʉnʉʉ (Comanche), Karankawa, and Lipan Apache. The Department is also committed to working with the appropriate University offices to fulfill this vision. Among others, these include Baylor’s liaison to Native Nations and Indigenous Communities, the Office of the Vice Provost for Community Engagement and Belonging, and the Department of Multicultural Affairs.
Finally, as scholars and members of the Baylor University community, we strive to recruit, support, advance, and retain a variety of faculty members, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and undergraduates. We adhere to Commitment III of Baylor’s strategic plan, which identifies a “vibrant, caring, global community” as a cornerstone of the Baylor experience. In line with this commitment, the History Department strives “to be a place where civility, respect and the ability to communicate in a way that is invitational to others are the mark of leadership.” We seek to be a department “where every student, faculty, staff and administrator is a reflection of God’s love for every person,” respecting differences in experience such as age, race, gender, veteran status, physical ability, religion, language, professional experience, skills and specializations, values and culture, social class, etc.
We welcome applications for our current faculty openings. We also encourage a broad range of applications for graduate school and postdoctoral fellowships, committing ourselves to working with the University to support our growing undergraduate population.