"It's a bittersweet decision for me because I've been at Amherst for 13 years," said Blight. "I can assure you that it's not easy to leave in a host of many ways. I would never have decided to leave but for a handful of places and almost not even then."
Blight said that his decision to leave came from the numerous opportunities that would be afforded to him as part of the Yale faculty. "It's an opportunity to be part of one of the best history departments, to teach graduate students and to be associated with great libraries," he said.
"Another huge consideration for me was Yale's relatively new center for the study of slavery and abolition," Blight said in reference to Yale's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, a small research institute that is a division of the Yale Center for International and Area Studies. The focus of the center corresponds directly with Blight's main area of expertise: the Civil War and Reconstruction eras and Black studies. "Within a couple of years I'll most likely be directly associated with it," he said.
Blight was approached with offers from the history departments of several different universities, including those of Brown and Harvard Universities. "I chose Yale because it seemed to be the better fit. The Yale history department seemed to need someone of my field and I liked the people there," Blight said.
Although technically employed by Yale, Blight will remain at the College next semester in order to finish up current projects including his work with several senior thesis writers.
Blight has served as chairman of the College's history department and search committees and on the Committee of Six in the past.
"He's been a terrific colleague and a terrific professor," said Professor of History Sean Redding, who currently serves as chair of the history department. "It's a real shame we're losing him-a real shame. I wish we could lock him in a room and not let him go!"
"He's been very active in his field and has published numerous works, which have been very well received," added Redding. "It's a significant blow to lose him."
The history department will not automatically be able to hire a new full-time history professor but must apply to the Committee on Educational Policy in the spring for a replacement faculty slot, according to Redding. The search for a new professor to take Blight's place will begin next year.
At Yale, Blight plans to offer large lecture courses on the Civil War and on African-American history, in addition to various seminars at the graduate and undergraduate levels.
"I'd be helping the graduate students with their Ph.D's," said Blight. "It's an opportunity to train some little portion of the next generation of historians."
Yale history chairman Jon Butler described Blight as "a fantastic research scholar who's made immense contributions to the rewriting of American history," according to The Yale Daily News.
Blight's book "Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory" has won an unprecedented six national prizes for the best book of 2001 on slavery and the Civil War, including the Frederick Douglass Prize and the Lincoln Prize.
Blight is also the author of "Frederick Douglass's Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee," published in 1989, and is the editor of five other books on Douglass and the Civil War.
Prior to receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1985, Blight was a high school teacher in his hometown of Flint, Mich.