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When Sara Posen returned to Trent five years after her graduation, she returned to many of the classrooms and hallways, dining halls and lecture halls -- even the Trent Express bus -- that she had frequented as a student. She fondly recalls the strange thrill of taking the all-too-familiar journey from P.R. to Symons campus, still with her backpack on, still crushed up against other students, some of whom, like her, were heading to class. This time, however, Sara would take her place at the front of the class, not in an incomfortable lecture-hall chair, ready to address these students in her capacity as Professor Posen of the history department.

Sara, a former Lady Eaton College student, has spent the last three academic years as a sessional faculty replacement for Doug McCalla. She's clearly revelling in her Trent homecoming, especially now that she's over the initial shock of being back to teach some of the courses that she herself took -- always a rather eerie experience. Since 1997, she's been teaching the second-year "Making of Canada: Conquest to Confederation" course, as well as a third-year Canadian women's history course and a fourth-year seminar on Upper Canada that she's repackaged as a course on the social history of Ontario. Now revising lectures rather than writing them from scratch (she's a seasoned veteran!), she finds the other side of the Trent experience as stimulating as her own student days. In fact, Sara sees a lot of herself in the students she teaches, noticing the same sparks of enthusiasm and keenness for the discipline she loves, especially at the all-important second-year level when students' individual interests are truly being shaped.

Sara's own interests were certainly being formed at that point in her undergraduate life, but she comments that it was only in third year that she began to ask the "So what is this graduate school thing?" questions. Like so many other Trent students, she discussed her future over "coffee with a prof," and applied to grad school because it "didn't do any harm to fill out the forms." No harm, indeed: Sara ended up in a one-year M.A. at McMaster, where she was struck by how well prepared she was for graduate work. Her M.A. year closely parallelled her honours year at Trent in terms of workload and expectations, and she was surprised by how few of her peers had been exposed to Trent-like tutorials and interdisciplinarity.

Following her time in Hamilton, Sara moved to the west coast to begin her Ph.D. at Simon Fraser University. She's currently polishing up her dissertation on child welfare in nineteenth-century Ontario, an interest which has helped shape some of her Trent teaching. And, as I talked to her, it was easy to see that teaching is Sara's passion. She enjoys the challenge of making pre-Confederation history exciting and meaningful for her students, many of whom are taking her second-year course with some trepidation or even reluctance. Sara's approach is to characterize this period as a history of the people, people who were building a society and developing a nation; students soon become intrigued by such topics as the roles of women and Native peoples, as well as by the issues surrounding the development of education and social institutions such as prisons. Sara is thankful, too, to be teaching at a place like Trent which, as she says, "values its undergraduate teaching so much." She looks back at her McMaster experiences and finds Trent to be so much more student-centred, caring, and supportive -- traits that Sara carries over into her own approach to teaching through her strong belief in maintaining dialogue with her students and telling them why it matters that they should do things well.

Beyond the classroom, Sara is thrilled to see a growing and changing Peterborough ("sushi and cappuccino in Peterborough -- who'd have thought it?"). At the same time, she's pleased to see that many of the things that make Trent the place she grew to love have remained unchanged: the small classes, the community atmosphere, the close faculty-student contact -- a place, as she puts it, of "people and books." She admits that she's troubled by what she sees as some recent shifts in emphasis, particularly the centralization of college activities, but is still proud to be back at the place where she met her best friends (many of whom she hopes will be reading this!).

So what does the future have in store for Professor Posen? Her latest Trent adventure ends in the spring, and with her dissertation also behind her (she hopes), she will turn to pastures new. Obviously a faculty position somewhere else would be ideal, although eventually returning to Trent would be perfect. However, she jokes that she would content herself with a chance to actually live with her husband -- a novel concept, since he teaches at Brock -- so something in that part of the province would be ideal, and even teachers' college is not out of the question. For now I imagine that Sara will relish doing what she enjoys most for the next few months at Trent, a feeling that I confirmed just a few short hours after I finished my interview with her. There, on the Scott House lawn on a bright October day, clustered around a picnic table, was a group of students deep in discussion with their prof -- Sara Posen herself, a truly Trent person in a truly Trent situation.

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