Welcome from the Chair
With over three hundred and fifty undergraduate majors, an entering class of ten to twelve graduate students each year and over thirty full-time faculty, the Department is a vibrant center of historical inquiry, large enough to offer courses on topics from antiquity to the present and small enough to sustain close faculty-student contact.
The Department's traditional strengths include religious and intellectual history, stretching across geographical boundaries, but as you will find, our faculty and students' interests are increasingly diverse, with areas of emphasis that include environmental history, legal history and an array of other subjects.
Our recently redesigned undergraduate program includes a gateway course on historical method for majors, strong encouragement to use study-abroad experience in student research projects and Department and College of Arts and Letters support for student research around the country and even the world. Our active and entirely student-led History Club sponsors numerous events and lectures for majors each academic year. The most motivated undergraduates may apply for a rigorous honors sequence that culminates in a year-long senior thesis directed by a faculty member, and all undergraduates benefit from a distribution of courses that ensures a measure of breadth and depth.
Graduate students typically work in one of four geographical or temporal areas -—medieval history, European history, Latin American history and U.S. history—but are encouraged to develop research topics that draw upon the strengths of department faculty from outside their immediate area of interest. We are proud of the fellowships and awards received by our graduate students and recent Ph.D. recipients, as well as our placement record (available on this website) and are working hard to provide graduate students with the opportunities and training that enable them to do superb historical work.
Do you want to know more?
Please contact us if you require additional information. We look forward to hearing from you!
John McGreevy
Chair
Department of History