Origins & Trajectories houses projects that focus on the trajectory of the university over time, with a focus on examining received histories, recontextualizing existing narratives, and centering heretofore ignored stories.
Project Sites
The 1817 Project: Land, Culture, Memory, and Repair
Winter 2024 - present
Co-PIs: Eric Hemenway, Bethany Hughes, and Michael Witgen
This project site involves an historical examination of the foundational land transfer by the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Bodewadami nations in the 1817 Treaty of Fort Meigs (also known as the Treaty of the Maumee Rapids) that was part of the university’s origins in Detroit and subsequent relocation to Ann Arbor. Our hope is to better understand this complex process and its longer term consequences in relation to broader histories of Native American and Indigenous land dispossession in the Great Lakes Region and across North America. Work on the 1817 Project includes deep, collaborative research into the early history of the university and Michigan territory, and also how this history has been represented, occluded, contested, and addressed through more recent legal challenges, Native student activism, and statewide forms of legislation since the 1970s (e.g., the Michigan Indian Tuition Waiver).
The 1956 Project is working to recover the stories of the members of the inaugural class and faculty at the University of Michigan-Flint who joined the school at the very beginning and made a lasting impact—both during their time on campus and in their lives afterwards. Our research focuses on individual stories, using biography as a tool not only to understand the experiences of that first group of students and educators as people, but also to place their efforts and achievements in social and historical context. This project aims both to illuminate the unique ways in which UM-Flint’s early students and faculty experienced campus life and to draw attention to what has changed since then.
The 1959 Project: University of Michigan-Dearborn’s Origins and Timelines
Winter 2024 - present
PI: Camron Amin
This project examines not just how the Dearborn campus got started in the 1950s, but also considers multiple inflection points to the present. To understand both the progress and missed opportunities of inclusivity initiatives at UM-Dearborn, the 1959 Project is pursuing foundational initiatives in oral history, survey and focus group research, and archival development.
Urban Renewal and the University of Michigan-Flint
Spring 2024 - Summer 2026
Co-PIs: Callum Carr-Marquis and Benjamin Gaydos
In the 1960s and 1970s, American metropolitan areas razed neighborhoods to build freeways in the name of urban renewal. In theory, the city planning philosophy known as urban renewal called for removing blighted neighborhoods to increase the desirability of living and working in quickly shrinking cities. In practice, however, the policy was used by local governments to bulldoze and scatter Black communities. Particularly in the city of Flint, the St. John Street and Floral Park (southside) neighborhoods were destroyed and their vibrant communities displaced to make way for the I-69/I-475 freeway interchange and an industrial park. Expanding the UM-Flint campus, a goal of the city’s urban renewal plans, is crucial to this history. This project worked to shed light on the Black communities displaced by urban renewal in Flint while examining the role of the University of Michigan-Flint in this process.
Legacies of Care, Healing, and Belonging: A History of Michigan Medicine
Fall 2026 - Present
Co-PIs: Laura Hirshbein, Tonya Kneff-Chang, and J. Alex Navarro
Michigan Medicine — one of the oldest and largest academic medical centers in the country — frequently recounts its history as a sequence of firsts: the first university-owned hospital, a pioneer in the admission of women and Black students to the Medical School, and groundbreaking discoveries and treatments that have radiated well beyond Ann Arbor. This project site aims to move past the standard narrative of medicine as a linear progression of triumph and progress to one that examines the deeper history of the U-M medical center. It does so by pursuing a more expansive account of inclusion and exclusion, labor activism, interprofessional cooperation and tension, and race and gender in medical education and clinical work across the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It follows Michigan Medicine’s relationships with the people it trained, with those who performed the daily work of care, with patients and families, and with communities across southeast Michigan.
