Dr. Sean Gallagher is one of the newest professors in the history department. Gallagher is a Bay Area native who went from punk rocker to a professional historian with a focus on slavery.
Gallagher did not initially have an interest in history or academia in general. He started his academic career in community college where he spent four years as he tried to figure out what he wanted to pursue for his career. He then transferred to California State University, East Bay to earn his Bachelor of Arts in History.
There, he took a history writing class where he had to write a biography on Benjamin Franklin. Gallagher fell in love with history writing from this in-class experience. It inspired him to study early American history and, subsequently, the history of slavery.
Gallagher then worked towards earning his doctorate as a graduate student at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis) from 2014 to 2021. His dissertation focused on how colonial state governments made the expansion and regulation of slavery into a key military and political goal of the Revolution.
UC Davis puts graduate students back in the classrooms as teaching assistants to provide them with in-person teaching experience. Gallagher emphasized how this helped him to craft his teaching style to fit student interests.
“I was a lot more didactic; I would just kind of talk to them for 50 minutes straight. It took me a while, but I realized that it’s much better to talk about a few things in depth, than a lot of things at surface-level. I also realized the best way to get students to talk is to show them something weird, something that makes them say ‘wait a second?’,” Gallagher said.
Gallagher spent the following year after graduation at the American Philosophical Society Museum in Philadelphia. However, Gallagher knew that he wanted to get back into the classroom and give students the same experience he received himself.
“The joke I always tell is that no professor was ever picked first for dodgeball. I wasn’t a good high school student, I barely passed. I was always getting in trouble and sent to the office for being a pain in class. I went to community college because my parents said ‘you need to,’ but I had no interest in academia or school at all. Part of that was being rebellious; I was playing in a lot of punk bands back then. I never had a teacher who really sparked my interest in learning until college […]. I needed professors [who gave] that extra push in the right direction,” Gallagher said.
Gallagher had previously stopped through Colorado and Grand Junction itself when he took an Amtrak across the country for research. It was Colorado Mesa University’s (CMU) unique teaching culture, though, that prompted him into taking the job.
“I applied and then interviewed, and I got to see the campus culture here. I was like ‘Yeah, this is a culture that cares about teaching.’ That made this position incredibly attractive, more so than other positions,” Gallagher said.
And so, Gallagher and his beloved nine-year-old cat, Martian, flew across the country and tried to get settled only weeks before classes started. Gallagher described the move as “hectic” but also expressed gratitude towards other history professors. Dr. Vincent Patarino, Dr. Douglas O’Roark and Dr. Erika Jackson all helped him set up his classes and overall made him feel more at home.
“Dr. Gallagher is a welcome addition to the history faculty and we are delighted to have him join our team. His expertise in the study of race and slavery, within the context of early American history, fills a much-needed gap in our curriculum. I am excited to see him build courses into our catalog on related topics. The historians are a very welcoming crew, I would say. It is always one of my personal priorities to make new faculty feel at home, especially since most are coming to Grand Junction from a distance. I experienced homesickness my first year and will always remember the colleagues who reached out and made me feel at home after moving 1,500 miles to be here,” Dr. Jackson said.
Gallagher and Jackson will be teaching an upper-division class about the study of women and gender in American history along with other projects still in the works.
Gallagher is also involved outside the classroom as the advisor for the history honor society, Phi Alpha Theta. He says that joining is a great way to network and also to be involved in a community that is hard to find outside the college world.
Gallagher is in the process of turning his dissertation into a book to earn tenure here at CMU. He is also still in-tune with his musical background, as he listens to albums every day. He eventually plans to get back together with one of his band friends and begin recording again.
