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Linda Killen’s five-month trip to Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1986 was more than a research excursion. Killen’s father had been a foreign aid director in what is now called USAID, and she lived in Yugoslavia between the ages of seven and eleven. During those formative childhood years when one essentially grows up, “it was my home,” she says.
“Americans know very little about Yugoslavia -- past or present,” says Killen, “and what we learn from news reports is very limited.”
A history professor who specializes in diplomatic history, Killen’s original plan for her Fulbright work was to learn about American relations with Yugoslavia during the post-World War II period when her father was there. In doing her preliminary research, however, she discovered that the first chapter -- what had happened before World War II, had never been written. So, she says, “I wrote that
introductory chapter.”
Her research was challenging because it covered completely new ground. “I had no major surprises,” she says, “because I had no idea what to expect -- it was a big black hole. Every name, every little piece added to the puzzle, but it was like trying to fit together pieces of a jigsaw puzzle without knowing what the picture is supposed to look like. And when it’s all done you still only have 80 percent of it.”
Spending time in libraries and archives, Killen photocopied everything relevant that she could get her hands on. It would have to be translated later, after she returned to the states. Seven years after she did the original research, it became a book, Testing the Peripheries: U.S. Economic Relations with Interwar Yugoslavia, one of four books and numerous articles she has authored on American foreign relations.
Killen’s time in Yugoslavia wasn’t all work. She traveled, visited friends and vacationed on the coast. Before leaving the states she had studied the language but had given up on perfecting her grammar. “Fortunately, I learned that if you talk fast enough they don’t really notice whether your grammar is correct,” she says. Once when she got up to leave a group on a train, “they each said in perfect English, ‘It was very nice talking with you,’ which told me a lot -- they could have talked with me in English but were much happier knowing I tried to speak their language.”
Despite her personal and professional interest in foreign relations and Eastern Europe, Killen has turned her attention to a different sort of historical research. For several years she has focused on recording the history of the place that is now her home, Virginia’s New River Valley. With initial support from RU’s College of Arts and Sciences, she has published several local communities’ histories, which she compiled by conducting oral history interviews, gathering family photographs and letters and researching courthouse documents. Although she says not everyone sees as much value in this sort of historical research as in her previous work, Killen is convinced it is at least as valuable -- that understanding people’s lives in a particular time and place is at the root of understanding history.
[BACK]
Linda Killen’s five-month trip to Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1986 was more than a research excursion. Killen’s father had been a foreign aid director in what is now called USAID, and she lived in Yugoslavia between the ages of seven and eleven. During those formative childhood years when one essentially grows up, “it was my home,” she says.
“Americans know very little about Yugoslavia -- past or present,” says Killen, “and what we learn from news reports is very limited.”
A history professor who specializes in diplomatic history, Killen’s original plan for her Fulbright work was to learn about American relations with Yugoslavia during the post-World War II period when her father was there. In doing her preliminary research, however, she discovered that the first chapter -- what had happened before World War II, had never been written. So, she says, “I wrote that
introductory chapter.”Her research was challenging because it covered completely new ground. “I had no major surprises,” she says, “because I had no idea what to expect -- it was a big black hole. Every name, every little piece added to the puzzle, but it was like trying to fit together pieces of a jigsaw puzzle without knowing what the picture is supposed to look like. And when it’s all done you still only have 80 percent of it.”
Spending time in libraries and archives, Killen photocopied everything relevant that she could get her hands on. It would have to be translated later, after she returned to the states. Seven years after she did the original research, it became a book, Testing the Peripheries: U.S. Economic Relations with Interwar Yugoslavia, one of four books and numerous articles she has authored on American foreign relations.
Killen’s time in Yugoslavia wasn’t all work. She traveled, visited friends and vacationed on the coast. Before leaving the states she had studied the language but had given up on perfecting her grammar. “Fortunately, I learned that if you talk fast enough they don’t really notice whether your grammar is correct,” she says. Once when she got up to leave a group on a train, “they each said in perfect English, ‘It was very nice talking with you,’ which told me a lot -- they could have talked with me in English but were much happier knowing I tried to speak their language.”
Despite her personal and professional interest in foreign relations and Eastern Europe, Killen has turned her attention to a different sort of historical research. For several years she has focused on recording the history of the place that is now her home, Virginia’s New River Valley. With initial support from RU’s College of Arts and Sciences, she has published several local communities’ histories, which she compiled by conducting oral history interviews, gathering family photographs and letters and researching courthouse documents. Although she says not everyone sees as much value in this sort of historical research as in her previous work, Killen is convinced it is at least as valuable -- that understanding people’s lives in a particular time and place is at the root of understanding history.
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