2007- 08 Schulze Chair Mike Kimball
2007-08 Schulze Chair Mike Kimball comes to the po
sition from the University of Maine-Machias, where he’s an associate professor of anthropology and sociology. In 2006, he was one of three faculty members in the state to earn the Maine Campus Compact’s Donald Harward Faculty Award for Service-Learning Excellence. The award recognized Kimball’s efforts to infuse service-learning and civic engagement into his teaching, scholarship and service.
Kimball was an architect behind UMM's revamped Behavioral Sciences and Community Studies Program, now an interdisciplinary major that includes required courses that engage students with Maine communities.
He also developed several service-learning courses, including one in which students form improvement teams that identify a pressing community concern, partner with a community-based organization and learn by immersing themselves in the steps in a community change-management model.
Kimball describes himself as a teacher-scholar whose interdisciplinary studies focus on exploring the boundaries among academic disciplines. He recently published a re-analysis of archaeological data on Ireland’s Mesolithic period from a natural resource economics perspective. In addition, he’s an investigator and trainer in community-based digital ethnography, a method for young people and other community members to record, study and express their understandings of their community’s “hidden histories” and local knowledge.
Kimball earned his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1998.