After a year of seeking a director for Ball State University's Center for Middletown Studies, members of a search committee found the right person for the job right under their noses. History professor James Connolly has taken the post that was left vacant by history department chair Bruce Geelhoed in 2004.
"They had an open search for the position this year in the Spring Term, and I applied for it," Connolly, who also served as the program's interim director, said. "To some extent, it validates what [I] did as interim director and it gives [me] the opportunity to do a lot of different things, to work with a lot of different people on and off campus."
A search committee comprised of Ball State faculty members chose Connolly last week.
The center was created in 1980 to add to the research of sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd. The Lynds traveled to Muncie in the 1920s -- and again in the 1930s -- to investigate life in what was considered the most average city in the country. The couple published the studies "Middletown" and "Middletown in Transition," giving researchers a bulk of information from which they have developed further studies.
"[The Center for Middletown Studies] looks to promote research on Muncie and Middletown and some of the research on the Middletown literature," Connolly said. "We're doing a number of things in the near term."
One project in particular, "What Middletown Read," uses a decade's worth of library records from around the 1890s to track the reading patterns of Muncie residents.
The Center for Middletown Studies will continue its lecture series and participation in the "Small Cities: Past, Present, Future" conference, which, among other activities, gives the Center the ability to keep producing more content for the Middletown Studies program.
"Most of the research will be published or generate publication from others," Connolly said. "We just published a bunch of papers from the Small Cities conference in Indiana Magazine of History."
Connolly said that the opportunity to serve as the Center's director not only gives him the ability to plan for the program's future, but it also allows him the opportunity to work with one of the most studied cities in the United States.
"There's lots of other centers, some of which are devoted to local history," Connolly said. "We think ours is unique because our city is easily the most studied city in the 20th century. We're building on a huge record. ... The reason to study Muncie now is that there is a huge amount of material to build on. Somebody could find an ample amount of evidence to compare to their findings."
Connolly began working at Ball State in 1996 after receiving his doctorate in American History in 1995 from Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass. Aside from being a history professor, Connolly is a published historian whose research focuses on urban and ethnic politics from 1870 to 1930. His work includes "The Triumph of Ethnic Progressivism: Urban Political Culture in Boston, 1900-1925," as well as several articles and essays.
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