A man walks through a snowy quad wearing a black coat, cap, and brown leather bag. He approaches a door into a brick academic building and waves at a student leaving. Calming acoustic music plays.
The man, Professor Govind Sreenivasan, speaks in a voiceover as he walks through a hallway into his office packed with books, “History is not first and foremost a list of information. History is actually a way of thinking about the past, about learning how to make sense of human experiences, about how we can explain them, how we can explain causal relationships and about how changing our perspective teaches us to think differently about presumptions that we've had, our understandings of the past.”
The scene shifts to Govind speaking to camera in an empty lecture hall, and a lower third appears stating his name and his position as Associate Professor of History. He says: “My name is Govind Sreenivasan. I'm a professor of history in the department here at Brandeis. Iteach early modern history, which is 16th, 17th, early 18th century history, primarily Europe.”
The scene shifts to images of an outdoor staircase leading up to the humanities quad while the voiceover continues, “But I also teach South Asian history. I also teach the history of the Atlantic world and I'm quite interested in world history, in global history, which is not just a way of covering space and covering time but it's also a way of posing questions.”
Govind writes loudly on a chalkboard as a title screen appears that says “Govind Sreenivasan: Bringing History to Life.”
The shots go back and forth between students in a small round table seminar classroom, writing on a blackboard that says “Rational Capitalism,” and a ticking wall clock as the voiceover continues: “To me for students to come out of a class having been equipped with new ways to think about the human experience, new questions to ask, new problems to pose, it's important that they get the facts right but it's more important that they learn how to think and indeed I think it's a large part of what makes history itself so rewarding as a discipline.”
Close-up shots of students interacting in the classroom continue, but they move into Govind animatedly teaching in front of a projection screen in the front of the classroom and shots of shuts raising their hands. He says, “This is 25 years that I've been at Brandeis and I really love it here. First and foremost, students here are intellectually serious. That's enormously rewarding as an instructor. They expect to be challenged, occasionally maybe even to be entertained and that's fine, but most of them are really here for the intellectual adventure. But I think it also makes the classroom experience for everybody that much more rewarding. I cannot get through a class without multiple questions. The other thing that I find particularly rewarding about Brandeis - scale really matters in terms of the quality and the character of the interactions that are possible in the classroom. There's a reality to the intellectual community here that I value, that I think students value, I think that all of us value here.”
Music comes up as a montage of students engaging around a seminar table with the professor from different angles.
Scene begins with Govind speaking to camera, before shifting to voiceover as the camera moves around him as he stands outside: “I was always interested and remain very interested in the history of ordinary people. There is a kind of unacknowledged and difficult to recover dignity and even heroism in everyday life, and I suppose that's probably why I ended up working on the period that I did. It's always seemed to me that history is a way of in a sense capturing the full richness of the human experience and then striking differences, striking changes of what it means to be a person, how a person thinks, how a person operates.”
Voiceover continues as camera follows Govind as he walks through brick quad, surrounded by snowy patches on either side of sidewalk: “I think learning history is one of the most intellectually productive challenges that a student can experience. History is a wonderful vehicle for fostering greater global awareness.”
Scene goes back and forth between Govind speaking to camera and scenes of students reading books, leaning over the desk, and shots of the Olin-Sang American Civilization Center. He says, “If I were asked why someone should come to Brandeis to study history, I would say because I think we've worked the balance out right. I myself am notorious for expecting a lot out of my students, but at the same time the department is well aware of the fact that every student will have their own interest in history. We have consciously structured our major in such a way that there are lots of different ways to fulfill the requirements, but it actually represents a kind of a broader philosophy in that we want students to find their own pathway through the study.”
He continues to speak, “The students that I talk to, that we hear from, they have found history to be a kind of a powerful energizer along their way to whatever future it is they choose for themselves and it's good to know that.”
Video ends with closeup of Govind in the afternoon sun, before fading into an end slide that says “Brandeis University” while the music fades out.