IN THIS SECTION
Africa
Ancient Mediterranean World
Britain
Byzantine
Caribbean-Atlantic
East Asia
Early Modern Europe
History of Science & Medicine
International
Islam/Middle East
Latin America
Medieval Europe
Modern Europe
Modern Jewish
Russia
South Asia
United States
Areas of Specialization
African History
African history at the University of Chicago focuses on sub-Saharan Africa from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries, with particular strengths in the social, cultural, and political history of West, Central, and Francophone Africa. Faculty research includes (but is not limited to), precolonial state-craft, gender, sexuality, urban history, and colonialism. Students who chose to pursue a specialty in Africa will be trained broadly in precolonial, colonial, and post-colonial African history and in the use of a variety of methodological tools and source materials. Graduate students pursuing a Ph.D. in African history are expected to undertake field work in Africa to research the dissertation, as well as acquire an African language. Prospective applicants are also strongly urged to have knowledge of at least one European language.
A distinguishing feature of this graduate program in African History is the opportunity it presents for interdisciplinary, comparative training. Students are encouraged to enrich their Africa focus by pursuing coursework in other fields, such as South Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean, whose historiography engage themes common to Africa. Students will also benefit from other faculty at the university who focus on Africa from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including Anthropology, Human Development, English, Linguistics, and Art History. Faculty and students from these various departments gather together in the intellectually rigorous African Studies Workshop, which meets regularly to read and discuss cutting edge research.
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Ancient History
The field of ancient history conventionally designates the historical study of the Greek and Roman worlds from the end of the Bronze Age (ca. 1100 BCE) down to the fourth century CE. While students are expected to familiarize themselves with the important political developments that occurred in Mediterranean antiquity, the program in ancient history at Chicago is particularly distinctive for its emphasis on social and economic approaches. Their internationally recognized strengths in this area are further complemented by the expertise of a large number of affiliated faculty from the Departments of Anthropology, Art History, and Classics, the Oriental Institute, and the Divinity School.
Apart from acquiring a firm grounding in the critical interpretation of literary documents, inscriptions, and archaeological finds, students are encouraged to pursue innovative and imaginative avenues of inquiry, partly through their own programs of study and partly within the context of intellectual forums such as the Ancient Societies Workshop, the various conferences and symposia organized by the Department of Classics. Students are also eligible for travel fellowships to allow them to conduct first-hand investigations in the Mediterranean. Prospective applicants are expected to already have knowledge of Latin and Ancient Greek. Examinations in these and in French and German are held within the first two years of graduate study.
British History
The University of Chicago has a long and distinguished record of historical scholarship relating to the British Isles and the British Empire. The wide range of faculty interest in British studies, both inside the department and beyond, the remarkable strength of the library's collections in British and Imperial History and Literature, and the exciting array of academic workshops and colloquia make the University of Chicago a natural center for British Studies.
The Department's current faculty cover the chronological and methodological spectrum. Faculty research interests and course offerings make it possible for students to study England, Scotland and Ireland as well as Britain's former colonies in Africa, South Asia, North America and the West Indies. Faculty interests run from social and cultural to intellectual, political, and economic history.
Byzantine History
Byzantine history concentrates on the study of the history and civilization of the Byzantine Empire and related polities primarily between the early fourth century AD and the fifteenth century. Constantinople is important but provincial and minority perspectives receive attention. Byzantine history includes political, military, social, economic and cultural dimensions. Its documentation derives from literary, epigraphic, and archaeological sources. Its historiography has changed significantly in recent years. Byzantine civilization's genesis and duration are subjects in their own right that deserve serious investigation without imposing criteria and frames of reference from other historical periods or regions. A self-contained Hellenic worldview permitted the relatively undisturbed continuity and survival of Hellenic culture in a Christian context for more than a millennium. Yet it cannot be studied in complete isolation from other fields, with which it overlaps. Every student should seriously prepare a second and related historical field. Students need to understand Byzantine history in broader frameworks. Knowledge of Greek is essential, although other languages may be indispensable for specific topics. At Chicago the history of the fourth through eighth centuries receive special attention. We encourage integration of late Antique, Byzantine, and Islamic studies.
Caribbean-Atlantic History
The Negro slave trade was the first step in modern world commerce, followed by the modern theory of colonial expansion.
W. E. B. DuBois, The Negro (1915).
When three centuries ago the slaves came to the West Indies they entered directly into the large-scale agriculture of the sugar plantation, which was a modern system. It . . . required that the slaves live together in a social relation far closer than any proletariat of the time. The cane when reaped had to be rapidly transported to what was factory production. The product was shipped abroad for sale. Even the cloth the slaves wore and the food they ate was imported. The Negroes, therefore, from the very start lived a life that was in its essence a modern life. That is their history - as far as I have been able to discover, a unique history.
C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938; 1963).
Now to talk to me about black studies as if it's something that [only] concerned black people is an utter denial. This is the history of Western Civilization. I can't see it otherwise. This is the history that black people and white people and all serious students of modern history and the history of the world have to know. To say it's some kind of ethnic problem is a lot of nonsense.
C. L. R. James, "Black Studies and the Contemporary Student," (1969).
Scholarly explorations of political, economic, and cultural linkages among Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas have recently revived the notion of Atlantic studies. As the quotations above illustrate, the conception is not new. At the same time, burgeoning interest in probing the origins, reconfigurations, and consequences of the trans-Atlantic movements of peoples, ideas, and commodities has raised questions about the adequacy of historical frameworks premised on the national-state. The Atlantic World concentration brings together students and faculty with interdisciplinary research and teaching interests in the historical connections fashioned by slavery and the slave trade, slave emancipations and post-abolition labor regimes, colonial and anti-colonial liberation movements.
East Asian History
A PhD in history focused on East Asia may be pursued in the sub-fields of modern China, modern Korea, and early modern and modern Japan. Our program has distinguished faculty in each of these areas, and our graduates hold positions in the major universities in the US and abroad. Students and faculty also work across national boundaries in the East Asian field as a whole. For instance, students in Japanese history will often have a Chinese or Korean historian on their committees (and vice versa) and our workshops and courses are often designed cross-nationally with the wider region in mind. Most faculty members also have joint appointments in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations in the Humanities Division and work closely with students and faculty in that program.
The East Asian collection in Regenstein Library, one of the finest in the country, is a major resource for our graduate students. The collection consists of over 530,000 volumes, including 340,000 volumes in Chinese, 170,000 volumes in Japanese, 18,000 in Korean, Manchu, Mongolian, and Tibetan. The Center for East Asian Studies is another important force in graduate student life. CEAS works to foster communication and cross-disciplinary collaboration among the community of students and professors at the University of Chicago and throughout the wider East Asian Studies community. It sponsors and coordinates events such as workshops, colloquia, conferences and film series and provides information to current and prospective scholars on academic programs, scholarships and other resources available within and outside the university.
Early Modern Europe
Why study early modern European history?
Because in early modern Europe our obsession with the past first took the shape that it still has today. The turn towards an ancient past conceived as distant from ourselves, but needed for understanding who we are; the desire for emancipation from an immediate past conceived as somehow corrupt; the division of time into the trinity of ancient beginnings, medieval interludes, and modern aspirations to the future; the hunt for original documents with which to grasp the past so firmly as never again to let it slip from our comprehension; these themes and others like them have their origins in the centuries of Renaissance and Reformation, from Petrarch to Descartes, from the Hundred Years War to the Enlightenment, from the decline of the medieval church to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. Early modern Europe is the point in time and place to which historians and social scientists, humanists and neo-humanists, modernists and post modernists continue to refer, knowingly or unknowingly, in writing their books, taking their stand, and spreading their wings.
Why study early modern Europe at the University of Chicago?
Because we area dynamic group of scholars who interact with one another and will teach you how to do the same. Some of us are professors, others are students. We meet in classes, seminars, office hours, workshops, and conferences. We read, we write, and we talk. As a group we cover political, economic, intellectual, legal, institutional, and social history. In terms of geographical focus, our interests extend from the Iberian peninsula to the Ottoman empire, from Italy to the Germanies, from the British Isles to Scandinavia. Our interests, our ideas, and our specific expertise differ widely. But we share them with one another in pursuit of the same fundamental goal. Maitland said, "Such is the unity of all history that anyone who endeavors to tell a piece of it must feel that his first sentence tears a seamless web." We confess. Guilty as charged. Any division of knowledge is artificial, including national boundaries and sub-historical divisions. If you want to understand England, you need to know what happened in Spain. If your interest is focused on commerce, you should consider politics as well. If you wish to study the Reformation, it may be useful to read Wittgenstein and Foucault . In order to master the most recent scholarship, it may not be a bad idea to read some good old books. Or so we believe. Nothing keeps us more firmly united than the passion with which we question the boundaries of our field. But where does it end, you ask? It doesn't, we say. But isn't it impossible to deal with infinite complexity? It isn't. But how can that be? We promise we will explain.
History of Science and Medicine
The program in History of Science at the University of Chicago offers comprehensive training in the discipline. We especially emphasize the following areas:
- Astronomy from the ancient period through the early modern
- Scientific Revolution
- Science in the Romantic period
- Biology and evolutionary theory from the Renaissance to the present
- Psychology and psychiatry from the 17th century to the present
- The book and communication technologies from 17th through the present
- Medicine from the 16th century to present
- Statistics and probability theory from 18th century to the present
- Technologies of truth
- Theories of sexuality
- Philosophy of history
The program in history is organized by the Fishbein Center for the History of Science and Medicine. By going to this site you'll find a complete list of history faculty in the program as well as associated faculty. The site also contains information about faculty publications, courses, fellowships and applications.
International and Transnational History
International history is the study of the interaction of historical forces across national boundaries and regions of the world. These interactions can be very broadly defined–to include demographic, environmental, cultural, and intellectual and media exchanges. They also encompass the more traditional canon of military, political, and economic interactions. National identities and regional affiliations are interrogated from an international, transnational or global perspective.
The strengths of the core international history faculty are in the following areas: regional East-Asian history, US and the world, colonialism and post-colonialism, modern war and genocide, and human rights and humanitarianism. The unique strength of this faculty consists of the genuinely global coverage of the field of international interaction and their interrogation of the local articulation of global forces.
Some Chicago historians are concerned with international exchanges. Most prominently among them are Mark Bradley, Bruce Cumings, Michael Geyer and James Hevia. Many other members of the department incorporate international or transnational themes into their scholarship or teaching. These include Leora Auslander, Fredrik Albritton-Jonsson, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Tomas Holt, Emily Osborn, Moishe Postone, Julie Savile, James Sparrow, Christine Stansell, and Bernard Wasserstein. In addition to historians pursuing international, transnational, and global topics the department can also draw on the resources of the Center for International Studies, with its affiliated area studies centers, the Human Rights Program, Film and Media Studies Center, the Center for Gender Studies, the Center for Race, Politics and Culture, the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, as well as the large number of international, transnational, and comparative workshops affiliated with departments in the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Graduate students come to international history either as international history students proper or as students of national and regional history with a strong emphasis on transnational and transregional processes.
Islamic/Middle-Eastern History
Taken together, Middle Eastern and Islamic history constitute a vast field of inquiry, covering the entire span of historical time and touching virtually every settled portion of the globe. At the University of Chicago–a recognized center for Middle Eastern and Islamic studies since the early years of the twentieth century–the range of approaches for studying these histories is correspondingly wide, involving not just the history faculty concentrating on these areas but a large number of scholars in other departments, programs, and schools. The university also offers several programs, centers, and workshops (such as: the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the Oriental Institute, and the Middle East History and Theory Workshop) that are primarily concerned with Middle Eastern or Islamic studies.
Latin American History
The University of Chicago has a long and distinguished tradition as a center of scholarship and teaching on the history of Latin America. Chicago Ph.D.s hold faculty appointments in colleges and universities throughout the United States and Latin America. Our current faculty’s research interests are broad, diverse, and interdisciplinary, thematically (intellectual, cultural, social, legal, political, and economic history) as well as chronologically (from the sixteenth through the twentieth century). Our principal strengths are in Mexican and Brazilian history, but our students also work on many other countries, producing innovative scholarship on South American, Central American, and Caribbean history. With excellent library and language training resources and a rich program of seminars, colloquia, lectures, workshops, and conferences, Chicago offers superb opportunities for advanced learning and original research on Latin America’s distant and recent past.
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Medieval Europe
Like the territories of the ancient Roman Empire to which the pre-modern Mediterranean was heir, medieval history at the University of Chicago is divided into three main fields: European, Byzantine, and Islamic. Within these fields, faculty research interests and course offerings range widely both across and within cultures, from late antiquity through the fifteenth century, and from the military and economic history of community, polity, and empire to the intellectual and cultural development of religion.
Depending on their linguistic interests and abilities, students at Chicago may choose to focus on one of these fields or to take on comparative work across fields; they are encouraged to draw on the resources available at Chicago across disciplines, particularly in those fields for which the number offaculty in history is relatively small. Above all, faculty in medieval history are committed to providing students with strong empirical, linguistic, and methodological grounding in their particular fields of research, while at the same time encouraging conversation across fields.
In medieval European history, students are encouraged to think in terms not only of acquiring the necessary linguistic and technical skills of working with manuscripts and printed primary sources, but also of expanding their knowledge of European culture more generally. Faculty at the University of Chicago are particularly strong in medieval European languages and literatures (Latin as well as the vernaculars), in the history of high and later medieval art, in the history of sacred and secular music, in the history of law, and in the history of Christian theology and mysticism. In Byzantine studies, faculty are likewise strong in languages (particularly Greek and Coptic), in the history of art, and in the history of early Christianity. Students in medieval Islamic history are well-served by faculty in the Departments of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and South Asian Languages and Civilizations. Students in medieval European history are especially encouraged to situate their field chronologically with courses in ancient, early modern, and modern European history, geographically with courses in Byzantine, Russian, and Middle Eastern history, and comparatively with courses in Jewish and Islamic studies.
The language requirements for study in each of the three fields are as follows: for medieval European history, Latin (high pass), French or German (pass), one other approved language appropriate to the student's research (pass); for Byzantine history, Latin, Byzantine Greek, French and German; for Russian history, Russian or any relevant language; for Middle Eastern and Islamic history, modern Arabic, Hebrew or Turkish, Ottoman Turkish, Persian, French, German or Russian.
Modern Europe
The history of Europe from the eighteenth century to the present forms a vast canvas amenable to study from myriad perspectives. Collectively, the modern European history faculty offers a generous sampling of those perspectives. We encourage students to cast their nets widely with the ultimate goal of defining their own distinctive positions and voices as historians.
The Modern European faculty at the University of Chicago is particularly strong in the history of France, Germany, the Habsburg Empire and its successor states, and Jewish history. We are, with the help of colleagues in other fields and other departments, also able to support students engaged in colonial history, and the history of the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds. Dissertations both within national boundaries and transcending them are encouraged, as are a wide range of methodological approaches including those of cultural, intellectual, political, and social history. Sub-specialties of both faculty and students include gender, urban, and military history as well as the history of religion, of the human sciences, of race, and of critical theory.
The research interests and methodological orientations of the faculty are perhaps the best indication of breadth and profile of the Modern European field.
The faculty tends to work across fields as well as within national historiographies and encourage students to do the same. Leora Auslander is a historian of modern France including its Empire (with strong comparative interests in Germany and the Atlantic World), of material culture, gender and Jews. John W. Boyer works on the history of the Habsburg Empire and its successor states; eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany; religion and politics in European history; and the history of the universities in Europe and America. Michael Geyer writes in the fields of modern Germany, of warfare and genocide, as well as global history. Jan Goldstein is a historian of modern France and studies the history of the human sciences, practices of the self, historical methodology, and intellectual and cultural history in socio-political context. Moishe Postone is at once an intellectual historian, social theorist, and historian of modern Germany and of anti-Semitism. William Sewell is a cultural and social historian of modern France, and writes on social theory. Bernard Wasserstein is a historian of modern Jewish history and the Middle East as well as of the political and diplomatic history of twentieth century Europe.
The France Chicago Center and the Chicago Center in Paris
The graduate program in French history at Chicago has been enhanced by a gift from the French government that recognized the University as a “center of excellence” in French studies and formed the core of an endowment for the France Chicago Center. The FCC brings French scholars in all fields to campus for long- and short-term visits and sponsors a variety of grants for student research in France. Institutionally separate from the FCC is the multi-purpose Chicago Center in Paris, which just opened its doors in September 2003. Located near the new Bibliothèque de France, it is already serving our doctoral students in Paris as a site of informal seminars as well as a place to socialize and check e-email; a limited amount of office space will also be available to students. Conferences are also organized through the Center and it facilitates contacts with French faculty. For more complete information please visit the Center’s website.
Program of Study
Graduate students in Modern European History, as in other fields, generally do two years of course work followed by a third year in which they take the preliminary examinations, apply for funding for dissertation research abroad, and defend their dissertation proposals. The fourth year is most often spent abroad doing research, the fifth and sixth in residence in Chicago writing and teaching. (Students who come in with a Master's degree often waive the second year of course work.) Students are also asked to take a language exam in their first quarter in residence followed by a second by the end of their second year.
Examination languages are determined by the student's choice of research field. A grade of High Pass in the primary modern European language of research; a grade of Pass in one other approved language; normally, the second language will be in a different language group from the first, except as needed for research reasons.
Course offerings vary from year to year, but always include at least one two-quarter research seminar (required of first and second year students), graduate colloquia and mixed graduate-undergraduate lecture-discussion classes. The seminar has most often, in recent years, been co-taught as a combined French, Habsburg Empire, and German seminar, on a topic of interest to all three areas. Recent seminars have focused on questions of population, religion, and the politics of memory. Colloquia are most often thematically, methodologically, or historiographically oriented. Critical Theory, Material Culture, and French and German Historiography are among recent offerings. Finally undergraduate/graduate courses both enable students to prepare for fields or fill gaps in their undergraduate training.
All graduate students in the History department read three fields for their Preliminary Examinations. Those focusing on modern Europe generally read one field in their area of national specialty (e.g. Modern France; the Habsburg Empire and its successor states; Modern Germany; Jewish History), a second national field or a broader geographically defined field (Modern Europe, the Atlantic or Mediterranean World), and a third either methodologically or theoretically oriented field (intellectual, gender, colonial, social, history) or another geographically-defined field, but distant from modern Europe in time or space. Students are also welcome to read a second or third field outside the department.
Students in modern European history are expected to spend at least one year in Europe doing research for their dissertations. That research most often takes the form of archival and library work, but may also include the collection of oral histories, the study of objects in museums, the viewing of historic film, television, and listening to historic music recordings and radio newscasts and programs.
We encourage students to make an exploratory trip to Europe sometime between the summer of their second year and winter spring term of their third. These short trips enable students to assess the feasibility of their potential dissertation topics and to write stronger grant proposals. Funding is available from the University and from other sources for these pre-dissertation trips.
Our students have fared well in recent years in grant competitions. The department itself has some funding available for pre-dissertation research. Students have also found funding through the France Chicago Center, the Council for European Studies, and German Marshall Fund. Full-year funding is available through the Fulbright, Lurcy, Social Science Research Council, German Academic Exchange Program, Bourse Chateaubriand, German Marshall Fund, the Friedrich-Ebert Stiftung, as well as exchanges with the Institut des Sciences Politiques. (See the Funding section for a complete list.)
Once back from their research year all advanced students in Modern European History are members of one (and often two) workshops. These workshops provide intellectual community and further professional training after the years of course work. Students present dissertation proposals and chapters in the workshops, and often present job talks there. They are also contexts in which to meet and interact with faculty from other institutions. The central workshops for the graduate students in modern European History are: Modern European History; Interdisciplinary Approaches to Modern France, Modern Jewish Studies, and Social Theory. There are numerous others of interest to our students. Currently these include (but are not limited to): Gender and Society, Race and Racism, The Built Environment, History of the Human Sciences, and Nations and Nationalism.
Modern Jewish History
Chicago’s graduate history program has maintained a strong interest in Jewish history for many years. Currently the department has special strength in the modern history of the Jews in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Department members engage in research on intellectual, social, and political history as well as biography, memory, the everyday life of Jewish communities, the history of genocide and reparations, the Jews in contemporary Europe, and the origins of Zionism and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Chicago Jewish history faculty also work in other fields and collaborate closely with colleagues in European, American, and Middle Eastern history. Chicago is, therefore, a particularly appropriate place to study Jewish history in its national contexts. The related interdepartmental Judaic Studies program offers additional resources and opportunities to graduate students. The rich resources of the university library include over 140,000 items of Hebraica and Judaica including the Ludwig Rosenberger Collection of Judaica, which forms part of the library’s Special Collections Department. A graduate-run research workshop in modern Jewish studies meets on a regular basis and the program offers ample opportunities for seminars, colloquia, and dissertation projects.
Russian History
Why study Russian history?
Everyone has his or her own reason for studying a particular region and a particular historical period. Your attraction to Russia may have arisen out of a desire to add an "East" to the dominant "West" in European history; interest in Communism or the Orthodox Church; a fascination with multinational land empires or the landscape of the taiga; family roots in the Russian Empire; reading Dostoevsky or listening to Shostakovich; admiration for Faberge eggs or onion domes, or even a liking for snow and cabbage soup. Whatever the initial reason, the only justification for studying Russian or any other kind of history is that you really want to find out about it and think you have some talent for searching, digging, and posing historical questions.
Why study Russian history at the University of Chicago?
We have one of the largest and most successful graduate programs in Russian/Soviet history in North America, with particular emphasis on the Muscovite period and the twentieth-century Russia. To check this claim out, look not only at the publication records of the professors but also at the record of academic placement and publications of young scholars who have recently gone through the program, as well as the range of dissertation topics of current students, The Russian Studies Workshop and the two Russian history seminars, offered in alternate years, are the vital centers of the Russian history program. We also work closely with the Modern Europeanists. Our program will be particularly lively in the years 2003/4 - 2005/6 because of the unusually large number of conferences, workshops, and other events that will be funded out of Prof. Fitzpatrick's recent Distinguished Achievement Award from the Mellon Foundation, which also expands our possibilities of supporting student research trips to Russia. Thanks to Prof. Hellie's efforts, the University of Chicago's Russian and East European program is the recipient of FLAS awards for graduate students under Title VI. In the fall of 2003, Prof. Ronald Suny, a distinguished specialist on empire and nationality as well as a Russian social historian, formerly a member of the Department of Political Science and associate member of the History Department, becomes a full member of the History Department.
South Asian History
The Department of History at the University of Chicago has had a long and distinguished tradition of active interest in South Asian history both for the colonial and the precolonial periods, that is to say, from about 1600 to the present. , Dipesh Chakrabarty, Muzaffar Alam, and Rochona Majumdar are the faculty members directly associated with the History program. Depending on their interests, students may also benefit from the teaching and research interests of particular faculty members in related departments such as South Asian Languages and Civilizations (SALC), Anthropology, Political Science, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (NELC), Cinema and Media Studies program, and the History of Religions program in the Divinity School.
The South Asian history field encourages research in a wide variety of topics ranging from political and cultural history of Mughal India to political and cultural questions of colonial and postcolonial South Asia. Current faculty research cover such diverse themes as cultural practices and artifacts of Mughal India, South Asian Islam, identity-practices through and around South Asian rituals and the media, Hindu thought, popular culture and the media, cinema studies, colonial rule and its cultural and political consequences, gender and subaltern history, nationalist thought, questions and politics of modernity, historiogaphy, and postcolonial theory.
Increasingly, scholars in South Asian history are working out of multiple archives and historical sources in more than one South Asian language. Depending on their area of specialization, students are strongly encouraged to learn South Asian languages other than English though this is by no means a compulsory requirement. Through SALC, students can continue their language training at Chicago in several South Asian languages including Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Marathi. NELC offers courses in Persian and Arabic.
United States History
American History has been one of the central fields within Chicago's graduate History program ever since Hermann von Holst, author of one of the earliest scholarly histories of American slavery, was recruited from Germany to establish a History Department for the new university in 1892. His broad cosmopolitanism, interdisciplinarity, and commitment to engaged, field-defining research remain hallmarks of our American history program today.
The Department's nine current Americanists range widely in research and teaching interests, spanning time periods from the 18th through the late 20th century and encompassing approaches ranging from cultural and intellectual to political, legal, and social history. Faculty and student interests have converged in recent years on a number of particular themes, such as gender and sexuality, race, immigration, and ethnicity, African American history, urban life, the culture of the market, law and the American state, and western and rural development. But our seminars and colloquia, faculty research, and student dissertation projects are gauges of the wide-ranging inquiry supported by our program.