Ember Duke | layout editor
A love for history has followed Associate Professor John Dwyer his whole life.
His father lived through the Great Depression, got drafted into World War II and received a GI Bill after returning. He later worked for a defense company in New York, which helped make technology used in the space race.
“He sort of had a textbook history life,” Dwyer said.
Hearing about his father’s endeavors in combination with his own perceptions of current events as a young adult in the ’80s, sparked an excitement for the past and led him to his academic niche.
Dwyer spent this past summer in Mexico City scouring the General Archive of the Nation (Mexican National Archive) for information on the 1929 Escobar Rebellion.
He is the longest standing professor in the university’s history department and the only one with a specialty in Latin American history.
“I do research on Mexican history, but I always try to find topics that include the United States,” he said. “I’ve always been intrigued by international affairs and trying to bring the two of them together.”
He sees the 1929 rebellion as a turning point for Mexican history, one that moves from heavy military influence on the government to very little. In the fall of 2023, he was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, which funded a two-week stay abroad.
“This rebellion in 1929 by the generals led by Escobar, scholars haven’t really dealt much with it,” he said. “So I saw the need to, you know, pay [closer] attention to it, because it really was the last of them. It brought, again, about a 100-year period to an end.”
He plans to publish two articles based on his research. One is domestically focused on the context of the rebellion in Mexico and the other goes into the United States’ involvement in the event.
Aside from research, Dwyer also enjoyed the local food and culture while abroad. In total, Dwyer spent nearly two years of his adult life in Mexico. His many trips have shown him the city’s evolution.
“I never sat in such bad traffic as I did this past summer and never before in Mexico City, because cars have just explode. Over the decades, Mexico City has seen a building boom,” he said. “But there’s certain parts about it that haven’t changed at all. You know, beautiful avenues, colonial architecture, some parts that are really charming, and then there’s other parts that are extremely dangerous too. So like all cities.”
Dwyer found his particular interest in Latin American studies in graduate school at the University of Illinois, which eventually led him to start teaching at Duquesne 23 years ago.
History department chair, John Mitcham, said Dwyer, who was previously in the position, was a valuable advisor to him when he started at Duquesne.
“The administration has a great deal of respect for him and has appointed him to assist in a lot of important projects over the years,” Mitcham said.
Archival work is a particularly difficult type of research because of delicate conservation needs and sometimes the lack of proper preservation. For this, historians need extensive time to work on their research, something Dwyer did not have while department chair.
Since archives have reopened post-Covid, historians have been able to get back into their hands-on work, Dwyer said.
Mitcham said he is happy to see that Dwyer was able to take that time and delve back into his studies in the past few years.
“So what’s really exciting for me is to see that Jay [Dwyer] is… no longer a department chair, is able to spend his time, get back into the archives and be able to work on his scholarship.”
Dwyer’s love for his research is evident in his class instruction. Senior political science major Julien Altamare took Dwyer’s Revolution in Modern Latin America class. He said Dwyer is one of the main reasons he’s interested in picking up a history minor.
“I have full confidence that you could ask him any kind of question. If he didn’t have the answer, he would have a way to get the answer,” Altamare said.
From hearing “cinematic” tales of his travels, to his positive and personable attitude, Altamare said Dwyer was one of his favorite professors to talk to.
“When you have a professor that’s passionate about what they’re teaching, it makes it an entirely different experience,” Altamare said. “You know, there are a few professors that I’ve had that have had that, but Dr. Dwyer tops the list for me personally.”