Modern Europe: Introduction
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.