Graduate Program
Transnational/Thematic History
From their matriculation into the program, graduate students will explore comparative histories—transnational, transregional, and global themes—as part of a graduate training that will enhance their ability to place the subject of their specific research into a larger historical context. Core seminars will be regularly offered on each of the following transnational themes.
The transnational themes are designed to provide linkages across time, space, and disciplines within the Department of History and between faculty in the department and those housed in other departments of the University.
Atlantic History
Atlantic History is a dynamic field of historical scholarship and teaching focused on the common, interactive history of Europe, Africa, and the Americas, especially the Caribbean, from the late fifteenth century to the present. It concerns the transnational flows of people, cultures, ideas, and commodities, and their connections across time and space. Atlantic history also offers rich opportunities for comparisons, whether regional, topical, or thematic, and at the same time functions as an important constituent part in a larger world history. Crucial to Atlantic history are ships, trade, port cities, and links among various economies and to other oceanic systems; the formation of empires and the rise of capitalism; migration and diasporas; and cultural encounters, relations, and identities, regarding class, gender, religion, ethnicity, and “race.” Faculty participants include Marcus
Rediker, Reid Andrews,
Alejandro de la Fuente,
Seymour Drescher, Bernard
Hagerty,
Van Beck Hall, Patrick Manning, Richard Oestreicher,
Lara Putnam, and Rebecca Shumway.
Empires in World History
Empires in World History addresses political structures that have existed in varying forms for millennia, linking regional centers of power to outlying areas under their military, political, or economic control. While nation-states have been studied and theorized in great detail as both local and global phenomena, empires have been treated mostly descriptively, one at a time. This theme analyzes empires and the dynamics of empires broadly over space and time, including their formation, maintenance, and dissolution. It treats empires as large-scale structures, exploring the relationships of homeland and hinterland, metropole and colony. It focuses on the interaction of empires with each other and with smaller states and non-state polities. Within the empire, the theme addresses such issues as ideology, inclusion and exclusion, labor and resource mobilization. To provide context for the particularities of individual empires, the theme addresses the state structures antecedent to and coincident with empires.Faculty working in this area include Reid Andrews, William Chase, Seymour Drescher, Alejandro de la Fuente, Pinar Emiralioglu, Christian Gerlach, Bernard Hagerty, Van Beck Hall, Peter Karsten, Irina Livezeanu, Patrick Manning, Edward Muller, Richard Oestreicher, Evelyn Rawski, Marcus Rediker, Jonathan Scott, and Richard Smethurst.
Gender, Ethnicity, Race, Religion
This field examines gender, ethnicity, race, and religion as elements in the creation, maintenance, and transformation of systems of social hierarchy and inequality. In varying forms and combinations, gender, ethnicity, race, and religion have been fundamental and contentious factors within class formation; the making of labor systems, both free and coerced; state- and nation-building; the rise and fall of social and political movements; and the production of knowledge. Departmental faculty working on this theme include Reid Andrews, Alejandro de la Fuente, Robert Doherty, Seymour Drescher, Larry Glasco, Maurine Greenwald, Bernard Hagerty, Van Beck Hall, Irina Livezeanu, Loretta Lobes, Patrick Manning, Richard Oestreicher, Lara Putnam, Marcus Rediker, Rob Ruck and Rebecca Shumway.
Texts and Contexts
Texts and Contexts links aspects of the history of ideas (historical, political, religious, scientific, legal and cultural) to the modes of their transmission (objects, concepts, languages, performances, pictures, spoken, manuscript and printed utterances). It relates a wide variety of texts to the specific cultural as well as historical circumstances of their generation, while introducing methodological issues of more general importance to history as a discipline. Because it deals with the modes of communication deployed by past human societies, this theme is relevant to all types of history. It seeks to make us think about the sources we use and the demands they make upon us as historians.
Text derives from the Latin verb texere: to weave. Textus is the style and texture of a work. It is the assumption of a contextual approach that the historical meaning of texts is significantly determined by answers to the following sorts of questions: Why was a specific text produced and by whom? What was its social/intellectual/cultural function? What were the technological circumstances of its production and distribution? For whom was it produced and why? What were the power relations among author, patron, textual subject and audience? What are the relationships amongst cultural producers, distributors and consumers? How does what we know about these contexts affect our later use of a text as historical evidence? Included are Pinar Emiralioglu, Neal Galpern, Janelle Greenberg, Maurine Greenwald, Orysia Karapinka, Peter Karsten, Irina Livezeanu, Lara Putnam, Evelyn Rawski, Jonathan Scott, Rebecca Shumway and Richard Smethurst.
For more information on the graduate program please contact:
