Welcome to the Department of History!
We are a community of scholars engaged in cutting-edge historical research. Our expertise spans many centuries and continents: from Africa to Asia, Europe, and the Americas; from Ancient Greece and Rome to Byzantium; to modern nation-states around the globe. We bring different approaches, methodologies, and analytical paradigms to these various places and eras, but share a firm belief that rigorous historical analysis can give us a better understanding of our place in time.
As a foundational discipline in the humanities and social sciences, history offers a testing ground for assumptions and propositions about human actions, beliefs, and ideas. To study history offers a means both to explore our shared humanity and to learn about the particularities of the human experience.
We invite you to explore our website and learn more about our department: the subject matters that we study, the students with whom we work, the courses that we teach, and the engaging intellectual community that faculty and students have built and share here at the University of Chicago.
Latest News and Announcements
Make It Work: Career Prospects for Professional Historians
The Department of History has received $300,000 out of a $1.6 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to the American Historical Association. The aim is to help PhD students succeed as professional historians, both in the academy and in other fields that routinely hire and benefit from the expertise of historians.
History Graduate Students Present Research at Divisional Conference
The Division of the Social Sciences is sponsoring its second annual Student Research Conference on Friday, October 21, 2014, which will include presentations by five History graduate students on aspects of their dissertations. The conference will be held in Ida Noyes Hall, 1212 E. 59th Street, East Lounge, from 8:30 AM–3:00 PM. Registration is free.
What Comparative History Brings to Political Science
The role of the state is in flux. Eastern European states vacillate between confederation with the European Union and Russia’s growing nationalism; religious caliphates roil the Middle East and parts of Africa; and China mixes a one-party system with a free-market economy.
A group of scholars at the University of Chicago seek to understand the paradoxes of modern state organization and power by combining the disciplines of history, law, political science, and sociology. “The State as History and Theory” is a multiyear project directed by Professors Elisabeth Clemens in Sociology, Bernard Harcourt in Law and Political Science, and James Sparrow in History.
Taking the A Train: Korey Garibaldi Wins Amtrak Residency
Amtrak has selected Korey Garibaldi, a History PhD candidate, as an inaugural writer-in-residence for 2014. Garibaldi and twenty-three other writers were selected from more than sixteen thousand applicants to ride the United States by rail and write on a subject of their choice.
WWI through the Eyes of French Illustrators
Neil Harris, Preston and Sterling Morton Professor Emeritus of History and Art History, and Teri Edelstein, president of Teri J. Edelstein Museum Associates, have cocurated En Guerre: French Illustrators and World War I in the Special Collections Research Center Exhibition Gallery at the University of Chicago Library (October 2014–January 2, 2015). The exhibit is free and open to the public.
Congratulations to Our 2013–14 History Graduates!
We are happy to announce that the University of Chicago granted twenty-five doctorate degrees to History students in 2013–14. Degrees were awarded in Byzantine, East Asian, European (British, early modern, medieval, and modern), Latin American, Middle Eastern, and US history.
A full 72 percent of graduates accepted academic positions (40 percent tenure-track, 20 percent postdoctoral fellowships, and 12 percent full-time researchers or lecturers) in universities across the United States, as well as in England, China, Japan, and Turkey.
Betsy Wood Brings Historian's Perspective to Op-Eds
As a senior economic policy associate at the Institute for Policy Studies, D.C.’s first progressive think tank, Marjorie E. Wood, PhD '11, focuses on income and wealth inequality, minimum wage and worker justice, and higher education reform.
Tara Zahra Awarded 2014 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has named Tara Zahra a 2014 Fellow. She is the fifth faculty member of the University of Chicago Department of History to receive this fellowship, joining Ramón Gutiérrez, 1983; Cornell Fleischer, 1988; Thomas Holt, 1990; and Noel Swerdlow, 1998.
Writing a History of Passing Is Writing a History of Loss
Allyson Hobbs, PhD '09, speaks about the history of racial passing for TEDx Talks and on NPR. Using the Emersonian idea of "coming up with the emphatic facts of history in our private experience," Hobbs tells the story of a cousin who passed for white, and how that story set her research in motion.