Ruptures

Last week I was remembering an undergrad professor of mine to my partner. He was a Portuguese historian called Diogo Ramada Curto. I hadn't had much contact with Portuguese people at this point in my life, and he was such a warm introduction. I can still see his bright smile, his eager body language in the classroom, his eyes light up. He was leading a course on global empires. I remember him being keenly interested in the dozen or so students as individuals, as people. Even at an institution where this was not unusual, it didn't feel normal in a history seminar of this nature. To be fair, up until this point, I'd taken mostly lecture-style history courses so I didn't have a frame of reference. But I felt intuitively that history was for very serious, bookish men of a certain type. His interest in us as people was, well, kind of “disarming” for lack of a better word. He was interested in our intellectual development. I remember him asking very personal questions like “tell us about a…