“Teaching is the fun part” | Department of History

When you stroll into senior lecturer Marco Jaimes’ workplace, you get a way of the welcoming ambiance he creates within the classroom. Ambient flute music performs within the background as he sits leaning again in his chair, wearing a short-sleeved button-up with a graphic print of Star Wars characters, ingesting tea from an identical mug.  

He has a group of button ups with enjoyable graphic prints that he begins to put on round mid-semester to liven issues up, he says. Keeping college students engaged within the classroom is an artwork Jaimes regularly works at and was not too long ago acknowledged for by the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, which awarded him the 2026 LAS Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award for Instructional Staff.  

Jaimes, a historian of the Habsburg monarchy, loves his analysis, however it’s within the classroom the place he feels most at dwelling.  

“I enjoy the research, I enjoy serving on various things, but it’s really the teaching. That’s the fun part, I think,” mentioned Jaimes. 

Jaimes earned his PhD in historical past from the University of Illinois in 2021 and has been a lecturer within the Department of History for the final 5 years. He thought-about educating highschool, however he prefers educating college students in faculty who’re studying to be impartial; he likes serving to them be taught accountability and communication expertise.  

The courses Jaimes’ teaches are normally full, a testomony to his talent within the classroom and popularity as a superb trainer. He focuses on constructing relationships with college students, creating an area the place they need to take part within the dialog.  

“I never cold call. That’s a big no in my class. Because it’s all about getting them to volunteer and be willing to put themselves out there. I don’t think cold calling really helps anything to that degree. But it’s a multitude of things—trying to be open, trying to be a sympathetic ear, encouraging that permission over forgiveness, the engagement of emailing for even the simplest things, trying to get them into office hours,” he mentioned. “It’s basically throwing everything at it and seeing what sticks.” 

He usually teaches three courses per semester and appears for alternatives to deliver his personal analysis or pursuits into the classroom to maintain it fascinating. In the autumn, he’ll educate HIST 365: Fiction and Historical Imagination, which examines depictions of empire in media starting from Gladiator to Star Wars to chart how concepts about empire have modified over time. He’ll additionally educate a course on 19^th century romanticism and politics.  

Every semester he teaches a piece of the division’s core course HIST 200: Introduction to Historical Interpretation, that teaches majors key expertise like the right way to analyze historic scholarship and formulate historic arguments. The sections he teaches are all the time widespread with college students.  

“Not only did Dr. Jaimes display a noticeable passion for the subjects covered in class, but he also delivered the information in a clear and engaging manner, always addressing any questions that came up,” wrote a pupil within the nomination for Jaimes’ award. 

This spring his part covers monarchy, a subject influenced by his personal analysis on Franz Joseph.  

Exploring how topics understood the Habsburg monarchy

Franz Joseph reigned over the Habsburg empire for seventy years throughout a transformative interval that ended with the assassination of his nephew and inheritor presumptive Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the outbreak of World War I. Focusing on one area, the Bohemian Crownlands, Jaimes explores how common folks understood and linked to the monarchy and the way the state tried to achieve help by selling loyalty to the emperor.   

“I was fascinated with this idea of as things are changing, technologies are being adopted, new ideologies are forming, you still have this monarchy,” he defined. “How do the people in that region connect to the monarchy? What do they see in him? What do they want from him? What do they think is achievable?” 

He’s at present engaged on remodeling his dissertation, “The Unifying Habsburg Monarchy?: Franz Joseph and the Bohemian Crownlands 1867-1916,” into a book. He also hopes to someday return to research he did for his bachelor’s thesis on empress Maria Theresa, who ruled the Habsburg monarchy from 1740-1780. 

“She has a fascinating history that predates Queen Victoria, because when you think about Victoria, you think about her dedication to her husband and that she dresses in black for the rest of her life when her husband dies. Maria Theresa did that all before her. There’s actually a lot of funny parallels like that, where the Habsburgs have a lot of the things we associate with the British monarchy, but because they’re German-speaking, they don’t get that attention,” he said. 

He first learned about Maria Theresa from a footnote that mentioned her statue in Vienna. He visited the statue on a study abroad trip he took as an undergraduate and his fascination with Habsburg history began. He credits the trip and Maria Theresa with inspiring him to become a historian. Very little had been written on her at the time, and he found it gratifying to uncover her story from the footnotes of history.  

Creating the Study Abroad in Prague program

That journey additionally impressed his co-creation of the division’s Study Abroad in Prague program with affiliate director of undergraduate research Stefan Djordjevic. Both have been impressed by the transformative experiences that they had whereas finding out overseas as undergraduates. They wished to pay it ahead and supply a chance for college kids to actively interact with totally different folks and cultures.  

“I think being in a place and being able to see things in person means something significantly different than just looking at a picture,” mentioned Jaimes. “Engaging with other cultures, with other peoples is part of what makes the field seem less of a relic of the past.”  

The program will enter its third 12 months in 2026. It’s been widespread with college students, with a number of citing it as one among their favourite experiences at Illinois. 

“The journey gave me a brand new perspective on how we work together with historical past within the modern-day. It was additionally enjoyable to discover such a novel place with an important group of classmates,” mentioned alumna Rachel Danna Mulick (BA, ‘25, history and Spanish). 

Jaimes hopes students will pay the experience forward and encourage others to travel to explore a place’s historical past the place it occurred. The program has supplied yet one more nice alternative for Jaimes to create connections with college students and get them engaged in historical past.