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“A feast is made for laughter, and wine maketh merry: but money answereth all things”: so begins Desmond Fitz-Gibbon’s invitation to study “The History of Money.” It is, by most accounts of former students, a fairly irresistible invitation, and while no wine is served at the gatherings that follow, they are nonetheless lightened by laughter and merriment. Desmond “has a knack,” students say, for making learning fun. “Always quick with a joke” – or a story, map, or work of art to help transport them to another time and place – Desmond shows his students that they can play with their minds in meaningful and consequential ways. In one lesson, he presents each student a book – a physical book – along with a knife and fork, and invites them to dissect it. Knife and fork in hand, they realize that they have landed in the classroom of someone who understands that learning history can be a sensory experience, and all the more compelling for that fact. “He helped me love the humanities,” said one. “He made me think,” said another, “about things I wouldn’t otherwise have been interested in.”

Desmond’s light touch does some heavy lifting in his courses, as he expects students to wrestle with sensitive and difficult subjects. His syllabus for “City Life in Modern Europe” opens with Friedrich Engels surveying the state of London, Manchester, Birmingham, and Leeds in 1845, observing “everywhere … plundering under the protection of law … so shameless, so openly avowed that one shrinks before the consequences of our social state.” Though students may be tempted to shrink from the consequences of our social state today, Desmond gives them the tools of historical analysis they need to make sense of our times in courses on the history of energy, finance, British Capitalism, the consumer revolution, and metropolitan modernity. In his first year seminar, “Jack the Ripper and the Making of Late-Victorian London,” he lets students experience history as detective work, setting them on an investigation of the “Whitechapel Murders.” They discover, in the process, ways to think about troubling histories, with a deep respect for those who lived and died and a new understanding of “the systems that allowed murder to be sensationalized.”

Desmond’s teaching is animated by his own searching scholarship and high scholarly standards. His book, Marketable Values: Inventing the Property Market in Modern Britain, demonstrated how the visual and material experience of the real estate auction shaped the emergence of property as a marketable commodity. Likewise, his courses help students understand how ideas connect to the materiality of everyday spaces. Featuring primary sources, from the coins students handle in The History of Money to the diaries, reports, manifestoes, essays, laws, and lists of factory rules that take center stage in his survey of modern European history, Desmond’s courses demand that students engage in the rigorous work of original interpretation and analysis. “The only complaint I have,” said one student in a course evaluation, is that it is so “difficult to get an A.”

If Desmond’s teaching is marked, as students report, by contagious energy, captivating lectures, eloquent speech, and a passion for his subject, perhaps the greatest keys to his success in the classroom are his kindness, caring, and humility, his exceptional attention to students’ needs as learners and as human beings. If he leads them skillfully to the delightful surprise of learning, the genius of his teaching may well be that he meets them where they need to be met without losing sight of the hard and serious work they are capable of doing.

In the words of one student, Desmond Fitz-Gibbon is “a gem of this institution.” We couldn’t agree more.