News from 1991 History Grad Amy Sayward

Amy Sayward graduated from St. Bonaventure in 1991 with a B.A. in History.
With the sage counsel of her advisors (especially Drs. Thomas Schaeper and
Joel Horowitz), she pursued her Ph.D. in U.S. Diplomatic History at Ohio
State University, where she graduated in 1998. She has worked for the
History Department at Middle Tennessee State University since then, serving
as Chair of the department for four years (2007-2011) and eventually being
promoted to Full Professor.

Dr. Sayward has published two books. The first, based on her dissertation,
was published by Kent State University Press in 2006 and entitled The Birth
of Development: How the World Bank, the Food and Agriculture Organization,
and the World Health Organization Changed the World, 1945-1965. It was the
subject of a roundtable on development in the newsletter of the Society of
Historians of American Foreign Relations and led to her being named the
Sherman Emerging Scholar in International Affairs from the University of
North Carolina, Wilmington. Her second book was co-edited with Professor
Margaret Vandiver and was entitled Tennessee's New Abolitionists: The Fight
to End the Death Penalty in the Volunteer State. Published in 2010 by the
University of Tennessee Press, it married her academic endeavors with her
current activism.

Dr. Sayward continues to reflect on how well her education at St.
Bonaventure prepared her for a career. She presented her first academic
papers at the regional Phi Alpha Theta conference in Western New York, and
this year she is hosting the Phi Alpha Theta regional conference in
Tennessee for the second time at Middle Tennessee State University. And she
seeks to impart the key research and historical ideas that she learned in
her classes then to the classes that she teaches today. Someday she hopes
to match Dr. Schaeper's book production and Dr. Horowitz's enthusiasm in the
classroom.