In Pitt's history department, faculty and graduate students alike pair place-based expertise with sustained inquiry into comparisons and connections across borders. Our transnational themes foster dialogue and synergies across traditional subfield boundaries within the Department of History, as well as between faculty in our discipline and those in other departments of the University.
Atlantic History
Atlantic History offers dynamic research 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 studies the transnational flows of people, cultures, ideas, and commodities, and their connections across time and space. Read More >
Power and Inequality
Power and Inequality studies different forms of human inequality across time and space, and the social mobilizations that have challenged them. Seminars within this theme are pervasively interdisciplinary, drawing on the scholarly literatures on power and inequality generated by sociologists, anthropologists, economists, and cultural studies. Read More >
Texts and Contexts
Texts and Contexts studies objects and ideas, their circulation and transmission. Combining approaches in cultural, political, and intellectual history, this field is concerned with the meaning of things. Clifford Geertz once described man as “an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.” Texts and Contexts identifies, explores, and interprets these “webs of significance” over time and space. Read More >
World History
World History expands historical studies into wider relations in space, time, topics, and scale. Pitt's World History Center and associated faculty embrace diverse approaches to thinking history globally, including comparative, connective, macrohistorical, and world-systems approaches. Methods range from in-depth multilingual archival research to the creation of new digital tools for spatial linking of historical data. Read More >