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 Reid Andrews, Alejandro de la Fuente, Seymour Drescher, Bernard Hagerty, Van Beck Hall, Holger Hoock, Patrick Manning, Richard Oestreicher, Lara Putnam, Marcus Rediker, and Rebecca Shumway.
World History
World History is a perspective that stands out in its adoption of the world as an ultimate unit of analysis. This enlargement of the geographic scope results in a series of fundamental features characteristic of world history, namely, an emphasis on synchronic time, the formulation of exogenous causal relations, the prominence of cross-boundary themes associated with movement across space, interdisciplinarity, and theoretical thinking. Coursework in the World History Theme will build on these strengths of world history. Studies in world history rely heavily on historical practices in comparison. Comparison of historical data and sites of evidence is inevitably a procedure of historical study and is necessary in order to complete the connective analysis of world history. In addition, comparative research design, highlighting selected spaces, times, or topics, remains a central dimension of world history.
This theme also incorporates the study of Empires as a leading subtheme 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. Faculty working in this area include Reid Andrews, William Chase, Seymour Drescher, Alejandro de la Fuente, Pinar Emiralioglu, Bernard Hagerty, Van Beck Hall, Holger Hoock, Peter Karsten, Irina Livezeanu, Patrick Manning, Edward Muller, Richard Oestreicher, Evelyn Rawski, Marcus Rediker, and Richard Smethurst.
Power and Inequality
Power and Inequality examines the origins and maintenance of different forms of human inequality across time and space as well as social mobilizations for and against them. The questions covered by this theme include: How do different forms of inequality based on race, class, ethnicity, gender, and religion interact? What are the instrumentalities that create and perpetuate inequality? How do elites and ordinary people influence the distribution of social, economic, and political power? What paradoxes and contradictions follow the simultaneous decline in some forms of inequality and the rise in others? How do differently scaled systems of inequality—those functioning within the realm of household, community, polity, and international system—relate to one another? This theme sponsors a series of seminars that survey the scholarly literatures on power and inequality generated by historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and others, giving priority to the last two decades of theoretical debate and empirical investigation. 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, Patrick Manning, Richard Oestreicher, Lara Putnam, Marcus Rediker, Rob Ruck, Rebecca Shumway and Bruce Venarde.
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 Martha Chaiklin, Pinar Emiralioglu, Neal Galpern, Janelle Greenberg, Maurine Greenwald, Holger Hoock, Orysia Karapinka, Peter Karsten, Irina Livezeanu, Lara Putnam, Evelyn Rawski, Rebecca Shumway and Richard Smethurst, Gregor Thum and Bruce Venarde.