Scholars of American studies are intellectual polyglots, conversing with ideas and archives, artworks and icons. They'll tease out insights from baseball and the blues, Moby Dick and Route 66, the Mississippi Delta and Microsoft Word.

That spirit of inquisitive rambling is well represented in Peter Rutkoff, the founder and director of Kenyon's program in American studies. Rutkoff, an historian who has taught at the College since 1971, has written and lectured about topics ranging from the integration of baseball to the rise of modern art. A published fiction writer, die-hard Yankees fan, and avid lunchtime basketball player, he is above all a gifted teacher, who won Kenyon's Trustee Teaching Excellence Award in 2004.

The award recognized him for two programs that take his rambling-as well as his interest in African-American history and a lifelong commitment to racial justice-beyond the campus. One is the Kenyon Academic Partnership, pairing Kenyon professors with teachers and students in 29 Ohio high schools, including several inner-city schools. "I want to extend the bounty of the private liberal arts to public education," says Rutkoff, the program's long-time director. "The goal is social and racial equality."

In recent years, he has also rambled with students in a course that he team-taught with fellow Kenyon historian William Scott. "North by South: The Great African-American Migration, 1900-1960" entails two week-long field trips during which students conduct archival and documentary research as well as oral-history interviews in paired cities or regions-the Mississippi Delta and Chicago, for example. Student projects, featured on the course's widely praised Web site, reflect the wide-ranging cultural impact of American blacks' movement from the rural South to the urban North. Rutkoff and Scott, meanwhile, are working on their own migration project, a major book titled Fly Away.