The African history field at Indiana University presents the aspiring Africanist scholar with a rich educational environment. African history faculty members offer a diverse set of courses, with broad geographic and thematic coverage, and participate actively in the History Department’s thematic specializations in African Diaspora, Cultural History and Gender and Sexuality (see below).

As an additional source for students studying African History, IU has a vibrant Title VI African Studies Program. African Studies faculty offer relevant courses in a range of arts, humanities and social science disciplines. The ASP language offerings also are extensive. For graduate students, the ASP offers Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowships for the study of African languages and organizes interdisciplinary seminars and conferences. For undergraduate students, the ASP awards both an African Studies certificate and a B.A. minor in African languages. The Wells Library holds one of the largest African Studies collections in the United States.

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The ancient history field at Indiana University introduces students to the societies of the ancient Mediterranean world and the historical methods useful for their study. Faculty members in ancient history offer a broad collection of courses detailing the social, religious, political, and cultural histories of Greece and Rome while also participating in Indiana’s growing Ancient Studies Program. Indiana’s ancient historians also cooperate actively with faculty in Classical Studies, Religious Studies, and Art History to provide students with a comprehensive introduction to the ancient world.

Graduate training at Indiana takes an inclusive view of ancient history. Students are equipped to research and teach in all areas and periods of Greek and Roman history. Students are further encouraged to take advantage of Indiana’s abundant course offerings in ancient languages (including Greek and Latin as well as Hebrew, Aramaic, Coptic, Syriac, Classical Arabic, and Georgian).

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British history at Indiana combines the strong British, European and Atlantic strengths of the History Department with unique cross-disciplinary opportunities--the nationally acclaimed programs in Victorian Studies and in Eighteenth-Century Studies. The Victorian Studies program is based in the English department, which also houses the journal Victorian Studies, the leading journal in the field. The Center for Eighteenth-century Studies is an interdisciplinary program that brings together some twenty faculty members from several departments across the humanities, notably English and History. Both interdisciplinary programs offer Ph.D. minors that our students often take to complete their outside minor field requirement.

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In addition to notable early modern faculty in the Department of History, there are early modern scholars in a variety of area studies programs housed in the new Global and International Studies Building. The Victorian Studies program based in the English department, which also houses the journal Victorian Studies, is the leading journal in the field. The Center for Eighteenth-century Studies is an interdisciplinary program that brings together some twenty faculty members from several departments across the humanities. Both interdisciplinary programs offer Ph.D. minors that our students often take to complete their outside minor field requirement.

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Indiana University has a long tradition as a center for the study of East European history. The department’s special strength lies in the modern period, thanks to a wide range of geographic specialties. In addition, the Ranki chair in Hungarian Studies regularly brings to campus historians who focus on Hungary.

The East European history field benefits from Indiana’s exceptional interdisciplinary resources, including its connection to the Russian and East European Institute. During the academic year the Slavic Department teaches Russian, Czech, Polish, Ukrainian, Romanian, and Bosnia/Croatian/Serbian. The Department of Central Eurasian Studies teaches Hungarian and Estonian. The Summer Workshop in Slavic, East European and Central Asian Languages (SWEESL), offers intensive summer courses in Russian, Albanian, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Slovene, and Yiddish, in addition to the languages of Central Asia, Tatar, and the Caucasus. Generous graduate funding is usually available for SWEESL summer courses.

As a Title VI center, the Russian and East European Institute, includes a rich, interdisciplinary group of more than sixty scholars who work in the languages of this area in fields throughout the humanities, social sciences, as well as in professional disciplines such as law and public administration. The Polish Studies Center established at Indiana in 1977, hosts annually an array of workshops, conferences and other events related to Polish history and culture. The Hungarian Studies center brings to campus faculty who lecture on Hungarian history and regularly organizes conferences of interest to faculty and students. The Romanian Studies program has a strong interdisciplinary presence and has been the recipient of the first Romanian government graduate student fellowship. Finally, the Institute for European Studies brings together scholarship from a wide variety of European geographies.

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Indiana University has a great deal to offer students considering graduate study in Latin American history. The program offers a wide range of expertise, covering Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile from the colonial period to the present. Our faculty is particularly strong in oral history, collective memory, political culture, women and gender, law, literature, labor, social movements, cultural history, slavery, migration, racial and ethnic issues. Our faculty’s diverse and complementary interests have allowed us to offer a variety of graduate courses in Latin American History.

The varied strength of our Department allows students the freedom and resources to work on a variety of dissertation topics and many options for minor field study. Recent Latin American history students have chosen minors in Gender and Sexuality, U.S. History, African History, Russian History, World History, African Diaspora History, Modern Europe and Cultural History.

Our students in Latin American history have performed exceptionally well in national competitions for research grants. Past awards include three Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Fellowships, two Social Sciences Research Council Fellowships, a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Institute for the Advanced Study of Religion Fellowship, an American Association of University Women Doctoral Fellowship, an Erasmus Institute Residential Fellowship, a Center for US-Mexican Studies Fellowship, an Institute for the Study of World Politics Fellowship, and three James Scobie Memorial Awards. Our students also can draw upon distinguished Latin Americanist faculty outside the History Department and excellent library holdings.

More details about Latin American history at IU can be found at CLACS.

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Indiana University has a great deal to offer students interested in medieval history. Medieval studies faculty offer a range of courses on both the undergraduate and graduate levels, covering Western Europe and the eastern Mediterranean from Late Antiquity to the later Middle Ages. The history faculty actively participate in the university’s Medieval Studies Institute, which includes faculty and students from twenty different departments, and which sponsors talks and other activities of interest to medievalists.

Graduate students who are interested in medieval history are able to take advantage of a similar range of opportunities. Recent graduate courses offered by history faculty have included "Historical Writing in the Middle Ages", "Ethnicity and Identity in the Middle Ages", "Biography to Hagiography," and "Medieval Rome." It is possible for graduate students to minor in thematic fields such as Gender and Sexuality, Cultural History, Jewish History, or World History, or to do work in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science.

In addition, the Medieval Studies Institute offers a graduate Area Certificate and a Ph.D. minor in medieval studies, through which history students can take courses in a variety of different disciplines to complement their historical studies. Every spring, the Medieval Studies Institute’s graduate symposium provides students with the opportunity to give and listen to scholarly papers on a wide range of subjects.

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Indiana University offers a particularly suitable environment for the study of the societies and cultures of the Middle East and the larger Islamic world. In Bloomington, students may find several specialists of the field across a variety of departments; rich library holdings that extend from manuscripts and rare books to the latest publications; and unique language-learning opportunities that involve course offerings as well as various FLAS opportunities.

Prospective history students can take a range of courses from Islamic history surveys to specialized colloquia on selected topics and research seminars. Next to the courses offered through the history department, students can enrich their curricula by following courses on Islamic/Middle Eastern history that are regularly taught in other departments across Indiana University. Faculty members in our Islamic/Middle Eastern history are affiliated with a variety of academic centers, programs and departments across campus, such as the departments of Central Eurasian Studies and Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, the Islamic Studies Program, and the Center for the Study of the Middle East.

The ideal outcome of graduate study in our Islamic/Middle Eastern history field will include knowledge of a/the research language(s) relevant to the student’s research project; an awareness of the major historiographical and methodological issues in the field; and a specialized knowledge of the area/period of research. Since scholars of Islamic/Middle Eastern history are increasingly interested in linkages with other parts of the world, students will be encouraged to develop comparative perspectives, and conceive of Islamic/Middle Eastern history in a larger context, beyond the confines of an area studies approach.

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The Modern Europe field welcomes all students interested in the history of Western Europe since 1800. Our faculty is particularly strong in twentieth-century Germany, modern Italy, Jewish history and history of the Holocaust, gender and women’s history, cultural and intellectual history, and demographic and family history. We encourage our students to establish ties to other areas of strength within the History Department, such as public history, history and memory, and cultural history.

Students in modern European history also benefit from excellent resources outside the History Department. More than one hundred faculty in more than twenty departments are affiliated with the West European Studies Center, and the Institute for European Studies extends those specialties into diplomacy, public service, and business. Faculty and students in Modern European history are also active in the Borns Jewish Studies Program, the Population Institute, and the IU Economic History Workshop.

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Indiana University has a long tradition as a center for the study of Russian history, broadly defined. History department faculty interests include a variety of geographies that balance the whole of Central Eurasia with a more narrow focus on Russia's interactions with its neighbors, and a wide thematic focus that ranges from the social history of early modern peasants to modern diplomatic history.

The Russian history field benefits from Indiana’s exceptional interdisciplinary resources. The Slavic Department teaches Russian, Czech, Polish, Ukrainian, Romanian, and Bosnia/Croatian/Serbian. SWEESL, the Summer Workshop in Slavic, East European and Central Asian Languages, offers intensive summer courses in Russian, Albanian, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Slovene, Yiddish, Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian, in addition to the languages of Central Asia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. Generous graduate funding is usually available for SWEESL summer courses.

As a Title VI center, the Russian and East European Institute includes a rich, interdisciplinary group of more than sixty scholars who work in the languages of this area in fields throughout the humanities, social sciences, as well as professional disciplines such as law and public administration. The Department of Central Eurasian Studies covers many areas closely associated with Russia (central Asia, Finland, Estonia, Hungary, among others) The Polish Studies Center, established at Indiana in 1977, hosts annually an array of workshops, conferences and other events related to Polish history and culture.

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With 20 full-time professors and a robust selection of courses, U.S. history is the largest field of specialty offered by IU’s History Department. Students of U.S. history at Indiana examine a rich mix of topics, ideas, and literatures. In addition to their chosen focus in the history of the United States, many take advantage of the department’s strengths in fields ranging from Latin American, African American, and European history to such thematic topics as the history of gender and sexuality, medicine, or law. The outside minor option also allows graduate students in U.S. History to pursue serious work in related disciplines such as English, Sociology, Folklore, and Political Science.

Because there is no single “correct” way to study U.S. history, our program has been designed to incorporate the diverse strengths of both the department and the University in the scholarly preparation of a diverse mix of graduate and undergraduate students.

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The History Department offers an array of undergraduate courses and a graduate minor in world history. Undergraduate courses are offered at all levels of study beginning with foundational courses on the history of the world in the twentieth century, H101 and H102. The program includes lecture courses on such transnational topics as the Black Death, epidemics, East Asian world history, and a variety of undergraduate seminars on world history themes. Many of the seminars carry intensive-writing credit; they may be offered at the 200, 300, or 400 level. Some undergraduate courses are designed to meet the needs of students in the School of Education, preparing education majors to teach world history courses in middle and high school. Others serve the interests of students, mostly not history majors, who want to examine such issues as social development in low-income countries.

At the graduate level, the department offers a colloquium to prepare students to teach college-level world history courses. This course, H591: Teaching World History, is part of the department’s Teaching College History program. Some semesters the department also offers graduate colloquia or seminars in world history, typically on transnational topics.

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The history of African peoples, on the continent and around the world, is one the most fascinating and fastest-growing areas of historical inquiry. Focusing on transnational connections, cultural encounters and productions, and interdisciplinary analysis, the African Diaspora field offers an array of courses, faculty expertise, and research experiences for students interested in this burgeoning area of study.

After choosing a major geographic focus (i.e., United States, Africa, Latin America, Asia, etc.), graduate students are free to put together a program of study that best suits their intellectual and professional goals. Common thematic foci of students majoring in the African Diaspora include gender, labor systems, cultural representations, political history, and comparative slave societies. Students are also required to select an outside minor in a disciplinary field that complements their work in the History Department. Importantly, the outside minor allows students the opportunity to interact with faculty and students in an array of other programs, including African Studies, African American and African Diaspora Studies, American Studies, and Caribbean and Latin American Studies, as well as other traditional disciplines (e.g., political science, folklore, anthropology, sociology, etc.).

At the center of African Diaspora field are a host of faculty members whose teaching and research interests span a wide range of geographic, chronological, and thematic specializations.

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History PhD students may pursue a dual concentration in both Cultural History and a regional / chronological field (hereafter "time / place / field") of their choice. Taking advantage of Indiana University's strong concentration of cultural historians across geographical and temporal boundaries, this program is designed to equip students with a wide-ranging, sophisticated understanding of the claims made by Cultural History, and also to train them to write about topics in the field in a critical and rigorous manner. Though the dual concentration approach is strongly encouraged, combining a major in another field with a Cultural History minor is another option.

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Since the publication of Joan Scott’s “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis” in the Indiana University-based American Historical Review, gender has indeed become a fundamental analytical category for historians working not only in women’s history as a distinct field, but also in the histories of labor, imperialism, sexuality, political culture, and cultural history broadly understood. Simply put, questions about men and women’s gender roles have become increasingly apparent, indeed central, to virtually all varieties of historians.

This significant development is reflected in the gender and sexuality field, whose breadth and topical diversity represent one of the great strengths of the History Department. This field consists of around 20 faculty (over 40% of the department) who work on gender and sexuality in terms of research and/or teaching. Their specializations span the early modern period to the present and cover Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and North America. Topically, they have focused on everything from political movements to citizenship, legal concepts and practices, war and memory, race and gender, medical practices, spirituality, immigration, empire, labor, and other vibrant themes in this field. The PhD field requirements emphasize the comparative aspects of gender and sexuality historical analysis, and aim to enable students to use gender analysis as a tool for interrogating the specific case study focus of their research. In addition, the gender and sexuality field works with colleagues in the Gender Studies Department to provide the multidisciplinary theoretical and methodological tools that have become important in this field. In addition, excellent library sources (both the main library and the special collections at the Lilly Library, as well as the Kinsey Institute offer rich and unique resources for historical research in virtually all of these themes.

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Indiana University has much to offer to graduate students who wish to specialize in modern Jewish history. Within the History Department, particular strengths include East European and Russian Jewish history, the history of the Holocaust and twentieth-century Germany, Sephardi history in Spain and the Sephardi diaspora, the history of Palestine and Jerusalem, and the European eighteenth-century.

Indiana University is also home to one of the largest Jewish Studies programs in the country with affiliated faculty in seven different departments. Hebrew and Yiddish language are offered through the Jewish Studies Program, in addition to the wide range of languages that are being taught in other units on campus. Graduate students who choose to specialize in modern Jewish history in the Department of History can thus expect to be part of a truly interdisciplinary endeavor.

Numerous other resources are available in other units on campus as well, for example the Russian and East European Institute. Intensive reading-comprehension courses, Reading Yiddish for Holocaust Research, are offered in conjunction with the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies (CAHS) of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in the summer.

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The History Department has a wealth of expertise in the history of the family. We have particular strengths in the areas of historical demography, law and social policy, and the history of the eugenics movement.

From work on Eastern European families transforming under communism to explorations of women’s household labor, paid and unpaid, in nineteenth-century America, historical research on family history minor can complement work in related fields, such as gender and sexuality.

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The Center for the History of Medicine brings together the many experts and resources related to the field at Indiana University, by featuring a topically oriented speaker series annually. Graduate students in the History Department may choose the field as an inside minor, for most of the affiliated faculty teach within the department.

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A number of faculty specializations in philanthropic history allow our graduate students to combine historical research with work done at IUB's well-regarded School of Public and Environmental Affairs. Of particular interest is SPEA's arts administration offerings, which provide practical experience in philanthropic support of cultural heritage institutions and arts programs.

Students in IU’s Historical Teaching and Practice graduate minor explore the production of history—from its origins in reflection and research; to its expression in classrooms, museums, digital sites, and other venues; through its reception and reinterpretation in the public sphere.

Teaching and Practice minors draw on Indiana University history faculty’s expertise in the areas of historical editing, oral history, film, and museum practice--to name just a few of the media through which historical research draws from and reaches a larger public. They take advantage of IU’s unique status as the home of a number of historical organizations, including the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning History; three historical journals; and the Organization of American Historians, the nation’s second-largest professional historical organization. Through their research as well as through reflection on their work in these or other historical venues, we encourage students in this minor field to explore historical teaching and practice as worthy subjects of study in their own right.

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