history phd in usa

Department of History

Ph.d. programs.

The Department of History’s doctoral degree program seeks to train talented historians for careers in scholarship, teaching, and beyond the academy. The department typically accepts 22 Ph.D. students per year. Additional students are enrolled through various combined programs and through HSHM.  All admitted Ph.D. students receive a  full  financial aid package  from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. 

History of Science and Medicine

The  Program in the History of Science and Medicine  (HSHM)  is a semi-autonomous graduate track within the Department of History. HSHM students receive degrees in History, with a concentration in the History of Science and Medicine.  There is a separate admissions process for students interested in the History of Science and Medicine. For more information, please see the  HSHM website . 

Combined Doctoral Programs

Joint ph.d. programs.

Graduate Students

Learn more about our  students' research interests and dissertation projects.

CURRENT STUDENTS

Ph.D. Program

Stanford Ph.D. Program in History aims to train world-class scholars.

Every year we admit 10-12 promising students  from a large pool of highly selective applicants. Our small cohort size allows more individual work with faculty than most graduate programs in the United States and also enables funding in one form or another available to members of each cohort.

Fields of Study

Our graduate students may specialize in 14 distinct subfields: Africa, Britain, Early Modern Europe, East Asia, Jewish History, Latin America, Medieval Europe, Modern Europe,  Ottoman Empire and Middle East, Russia/Eastern Europe, Science, Technology, Environment, and Medicine, South Asia, Transnational, International, and Global History, and United States. Explore each field and their affiliates . 

The department expects most graduate students to spend no less than four and no more than six years completing the work for the Ph.D. degree. Individual students' time to degree will vary with the strength of their undergraduate preparation as well as with the particular language and research requirements of their respective Major fields.

Expectations and Degree Requirements

We expect that most graduate students will spend no less than four and no more than six years toward completing their Ph.D. Individual students' time-to-degree vary with the strength of their undergraduate preparation as well as with the particular language and research requirements of their respective subfield.

All History Ph.D. students are expected to satisfy the following degree requirements:

• Teaching: Students who enter on the Department Fellowship are required to complete 4 quarters of teaching experience by the end of their third year. Teaching experience includes teaching assistantships and teaching a Sources and Methods course on their own.
• Candidacy : Students apply for candidacy to the PhD program by the end of their second year in the program.
• Orals:  The University Orals Examination is typically taken at the beginning of the 3rd year in the program.
• Languages: Language requirements vary depending on the field of study.
• Residency Requirement : The University requi res  135 units of full-tuition residency  for PhD students. After that, students should have completed all course work and must request Terminal Graduate Registration (TGR) status. 

Browse the Ph.D. Handbook to learn more .

The History Department offers 5 years of financial support to PhD students.  No funding is offered for the co-terminal and terminal M.A. programs. A sample Ph.D. funding package is as follows:  

• 1st year: 3 quarters fellowship stipend and 1 summer stipend 
• 2nd year: 2 quarters TAships, 1 quarter fellowship stipend, and 1 summer stipend 
• 3rd year: 2 quarters TAships, 1 quarter fellowship stipend, and 1 summer stipend 
• 4th year: 3 quarters fellowship stipends and 1 summer stipend 
• 5th year: 3 quarters fellowship stipends and 1 summer stipend

Knight-Hennessy Scholars

Join dozens of  Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences students  who gain valuable leadership skills in a multidisciplinary, multicultural community as  Knight-Hennessy Scholars  (KHS). KHS admits up to 100 select applicants each year from across Stanford’s seven graduate schools, and delivers engaging experiences that prepare them to be visionary, courageous, and collaborative leaders ready to address complex global challenges. As a scholar, you join a distinguished cohort, participate in up to three years of leadership programming, and receive full funding for up to three years of your studies at Stanford. candidates of any country may apply. KHS applicants must have earned their first undergraduate degree within the last seven years, and must apply to both a Stanford graduate program and to KHS. Stanford PhD students may also apply to KHS during their first year of PhD enrollment. If you aspire to be a leader in your field, we invite you to apply. The KHS application deadline is October 9, 2024. Learn more about  KHS admission .

How to Apply

Admission to the History Graduate Programs are for Autumn quarter only.  Interested applicants can online at  https://gradadmissions.stanford.edu/apply/apply-now and submit the following documents: 

• Statement of Purpose (included in Application)
• 3 Letters of Recommendation
•  Transcripts are required from all prior college level schools attended for at least one year.  A scanned copy of the official transcript is submitted as part of the online application.  Please do not mail transcripts to the department.   We will ask only the admitted students to submit actual copies of official transcripts.
• 1 Writing Sample on a historic topic (10-25 pages; sent via  Stanford's online application system  only)
• The GRE exam is not required for the autumn 2025 admission cycle
• TOEFL for all international applicants (whose primary language is not English) sent via ETS. Our University code is 4704.
• TOEFL Exemptions and Waiver information
• Application Fee Waiver
• The department is not able to provide fee waivers. Please see the link above for the available fee waivers and how to submit a request. Requests are due 2 weeks before the application deadline.

The Department of History welcomes graduate applications from individuals with a broad range of life experiences, perspectives, and backgrounds who would contribute to our community of scholars. Review of applications is holistic and individualized, considering each applicant’s academic record and accomplishments, letters of recommendation, and admissions essays in order to understand how an applicant’s life experiences have shaped their past and potential contributions to their field.

The Department of History also recognizes that the Supreme Court issued a ruling in June 2023 about the consideration of certain types of demographic information as part of an admission review. All applications submitted during upcoming application cycles will be reviewed in conformance with that decision.

Application deadline for Autumn 2025-26 is Tuesday, December 3, 2024 at 11:59pm EST . This is a hard -not a postmark- deadline. 

All application material is available online. No information is sent via snail mail. Interested applicants are invited to view a Guide to Graduate Admissions at  https://gradadmissions.stanford.edu/ . 

Questions? 

Please contact  Arthur Palmon  (Assistant Director of Student Services).

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PhD in History

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Study History Where It Is Made

AU’s PhD in History will prepare you for a career as an educator, researcher, analyst, and writer working in academia, public and institutional history, and other fields requiring investigative and analytical skills. In this program, you will develop a deeper understanding of how historians investigate and interpret the past while you explore the past with your own original research .

You will receive a high level of mentorship and develop close working relationships with your professors. Under the guidance of our award-winning faculty , our students complete strong dissertations and present work at top conferences while making valuable connections and gaining experience in the Washington, DC, area.

This program is ideal for students interested in American and modern European history, including Russian history. Our department also has strengths in a variety of subfields , including public history, African American history, women’s/gender history, politics and foreign relations, and Jewish history. This diversity will open your options for research and allow for specialization without sacrificing breadth of study.

Rigorous Study with a Degree of Flexibility

Our program combines rigorous training in scholarship with the flexibility to pursue your intellectual interests. Our coursework will give you a solid foundation in historical theory and methodology, research methods, and United States or modern European history. Together with your academic advisor, you will design a program of study to match your academic goals . You will acquire and demonstrate mastery of tools of research , such as foreign languages, quantitative research methods, oral history, new media, and other methodologies. Your doctoral examinations will be tailored to fit your individual fields of study. You will then pursue your own research in writing your doctoral dissertation.

The Department will supervise PhD dissertations in the history of Modern Europe (normally for the period 1789 to the present), United States history (including the colonial period), US foreign relations, and modern Jewish history.

See all admissions and course requirements .

Cutting-Edge Faculty Dedicated to Your Success

Our history faculty makes national news, uncovers under-represented areas of history, and guides doctoral students , helping them generate innovative and influential research . From predicting presidential elections to publishing award-winning books and articles, our distinguished professors produce relevant historical scholarship and will train you do the same. With academic and professional mentorship from our faculty, you will you will enter the field as a thoroughly prepared and well-connected scholar.

Endless Opportunities in a Historic City

Pursuing your doctorate in the nation’s capital provides you with unparalleled access to renowned museums, archives, institutions, and resources . From the Library of Congress, Smithsonian Institution and National Archives to the DC Historical Society, our students are only a metro ride away from exceptional local and national repositories. As part of the Washington Consortium , students at American University are able to take courses at colleges and universities throughout the DC metropolitan area, providing the opportunity to work with a variety of faculty in diverse programs and fields of study.

A truly global city, DC, contains hundreds of embassies, cultural organizations, and enclave communities. Brimming with history , the DC area offers Civil War battlefields, the Capitol, Mount Vernon, the White House, and countless landmarks of the colonial period, Revolutionary War, Civil War, and more recent American history. The city is also home to smaller historical organizations like the DC Historical Society and the DC Preservation League. Whether your interest is global, national, or local, this historic city undoubtedly has something for you.

Explore the Possibilities

Our students go on to become university and college faculty and administrators or work in federal and state governments, for museums and archives, and in other exciting fields. Our alumni teach at universities around the world , from the University of Houston in Texas to University of Prince Edward Island in Canada and Ludwig Maximilians Universität in Munich. Our PhDs hold positions with the nation’s most important institutions , including the Library of Congress, Department of State, National Archives and Records Administration, American Historical Association, National Endowment for the Humanities, US Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Recent and Current PhD Dissertation topics

• Auketayeva, Laura : "Gender and Jewish Evacuees in the Soviet Union during the Holocaust" 
• Barry, Michael : "Islamophobic & Anti-Islamophobic Ideas in America"
• Brenner, Rebecca : "When Mail Arrived on Sundays, 1810-1912" 
• Boose, Donelle : "Black Power and the Organizing Tradition: Work-ing Women of Washington, DC. 1965-1990"
• Chatfield, Andrew : "American Support for India’s Self-Determination from 1915-1920: Progressives, Radicals, and Anti-Imperialists"
• Duval, Lauren : "Landscapes of Allegiance: Space, Gender, and Mili-tary Occupation in the American Revolution"
• Englekirk, Ryan : "The Third Team: Unmasking Fraternity and Mascu-linity Among Major League Baseball Umpires 1970-2010" 
• Estess, Jonah : "The People’s Money: The American Revolution, Cur-rency, and the Making of Political Economic Culture in American Life, 1775-1896" 
• Frome, Gavin : "American Protestant Service Workers in Viet Nam, 1954-1975"
• Gabor, Ruth : "'Moda' for the Masses: Moscow Fashion’s Appeal at Home and Abroad during the Cold War"
• Gibson, Laura : "It’s Love that Counts: The History of Non-Nuclear Families in American Domestic Sitcoms"
• Grant, Jordan : "Catchers and Kidnappers: Slave Hunting in Early America" 
• Grek, Ivan : "Illiberal Civil Society in Russia, 1992-2000"
• Harris, Curtis : "Hardwood Revolution: The NBA's Growth & Player Revolt, 1950-1976" 
• Hawks, Julie : "Capital Investments: Engineering American Cold War Culture" 
• Jobe, Mary "Allison" : "'We Remember Him for His Character': The Life of James W. Ford and the Communist Party USA" 
• Kaplan, Anna : "Left by the Wayside: Memories and Postmemories of the Integration of the University of Mississippi"
• Killian, Linda : "Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine: The Shared Political Ideology at the Heart of American Democracy" 
• Kitterman, Katherine : "'No Ordinary Feelings': Mormon Women’s Political Activism, 1870-1896" 
• Langford, Amy : "Creating a Body Politic: Boundary Crossings and the (Re) Making of Latter-Day Saints on the U.S. Border, 1885-1920"
• Levin, Jeffrey : "Felix Warburg and the Establishment of the Hebrew University" 
• MacNeill, Lindsay : "Policing Politics in Austria, 1918-1955"
• Milwicki, Alon : "Baptizing Nazism: An Analysis of the Religious Roots of American Neo-Nazism"
• Rafferty-Osaki, Terumi : "'Strictly Masculine': Reforming and Per-forming Manhood at Tule Lake, 1942-1946" 
• Recordati, Maurizio : "Russia Turns Inward: Russian Grand Strategy in the Post-Crimean War Period (1856-78)"
• Sowry, Nathan : "Museums, Native American Representation, & the Public: The Role of Museum Anthropology in Public History, 1873-1929"
• Styrna, Pawel : "Polish-Russian Relations, 1904-1921"
• Vehstedt, Scott : "'Lets Help Finland': The Return of American Relief Aid in the Winter War, 1939-1940"
• Weixelbaum, Jason : "At the Crossroads of Fascism: The Decision of Ford, General Motors, and IBM to do Business with Nazi Germany"

Alumni Job Placements

Graduates of the history PhD program are working as professors, researchers, and directors across the US and at international locations. Here is a list of where select graduates have or are currently working:

• Director, National Coalition for History
• Assistant Professor, University of Prince Edward Island
• Assistant Professor, Towson University
• Assistant Professor of History and Director of American Studies, West Chester University
• Independent historian
• Senior Archivist, National Archives
• Associate Professor, Ryerson University
• Assistant Professor, University of Arkansas at Little Rock
• Historian, US Army
• Senior policy adviser and special assistant to the president of the Humane Society
• Historian, Office of the Historian, Department of State
• Museum Director, Renton History Museum, Oregon
• Public History Coordinator, American Historical Association
• Assistant Professor, Bridgewater State University
• Lecturer in Sociology, California State University at Bakersfield
• Assistant Professor, Delaware State University
• Historian, Global Classroom, US Holocaust Museum
• Director, Digital Archive, Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library
• Assistant Professor, Illinois State University
• Adjunct Professor, University of Maryland at College Park
• Senior Fellow, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
• Assistant Professor, University of West Florida
• Independent historian and filmmaker
• Adjunct Assistant Professor of History, US Naval Academy
• Administrative Support Specialist at FEMA
• Senior editor and writer, National Endowment for the Humanities
• Instructor, Religion Dept., National Cathedral School (earned Master of Divinity after PhD)
• Curriculum and Publications Coordinator, AU Registrar's Office
• Assistant Professor, Seminole State College

News & Notes

PhD candidate Reza Akbari presented at the Middle East Studies Association's annual conference in Montreal, Canada. His presentation,  Etched in Mistrust: Continuity and Change in US-Iran Nuclear Negotiations (1969-1978),  argued that America's drive to keep Iran's nuclear program peaceful began decades before the establishment of the Islamic Republic.

PhD candidate  Andrew Sperling  published " A Halloween Party in Boston Turned Ugly when a Gang Hurled Antisemetic Slurs and Attacked Jewish Teenagers ," detailing the events of an antisemetic attack on Jewish teens at a Halloween party in 1950. 

Theresa Runstedtler 's new book on Black ballplayers of the 1970s and '80s setting the NBA up for success: Black Ball: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Spencer Haywoof, and the Generation that Saved the Soul of the NBA (2023) .

Doctoral student Maurizio Recordati Koen won first prize in the 2022 Trench Gascoigne Essay Competition for "The Stuff of Strategy: How Sublime Strategics Turned into a Real Thing" in RUSI Journal.

John Schmitz (CAS/PhD '07) published Enemies among Us: The Relocation, Internment, and Repatriation of German, Italian, and Japanese Americans during the Second World War .

Doctoral student Jonah Estess presented his paper, "Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems: The American Revolution and the National Origins of the Politicization of Money" as part of the panel at this year's Business History Conference.

Andrew Demshuk published Three Cities after Hitler: Redemptive Reconstruction across Cold War Borders .

PhD candidate Katherine Kitterman wrote on women's voting rights in Utah for the Washington Post.

Inaugural Postdoctoral Fellow

Nguyet Nguyen brings new perspective to the Vietnam War.

Discover CAS: The Humanities

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Department of History

Ph.D. Admissions

With more than 40 full-time faculty members, the Department of History trains graduate students in a wide range of fields and methodological approaches, covering periods from antiquity to the present.

Graduate students in history benefit from a high faculty-to-student ratio, which enables us to provide more individual attention than many other programs. The size of each entering class varies slightly from year to year, with eight to 10 students being typical. In all, we have approximately 50 students, a talented and diverse group who come from many parts of the United States and the world.

Vanderbilt University offers many opportunities for interdisciplinary engagement. The Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities houses on-going seminars in areas ranging from Circum-Atlantic studies to postcolonial theory, science studies, and pre-modern cultural studies. Other centers and programs whose activities would be of interest to history graduate students include the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies ; the Department of Medicine, Health, and Society ; the Max Kade Center for European and German Studies ; the Department of African American and Diaspora Studies ; the Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies ; and the programs in Asian Studies Program , American Studies , and Jewish Studies . The Department of History strongly encourages interdisciplinary work.

Please note: The Department of History does not accept external applications for a terminal master’s degree. The M.A. is usually earned en route to the Ph.D. It is also available to Vanderbilt undergraduates who enroll in the 4+1 program in history.

Director of Graduate Studies: Nicole Hemmer

Director of Graduate Admissions: Lauren Clay

Graduate Administrator: Madeline Trantham

If you have any questions regarding the graduate application process that are not answered here, please email us .

Application

The Vanderbilt history department offers the Ph.D. degree. Students normally earn the M.A. following two years of coursework, fulfillment of the research paper requirement, and satisfactory performance on language examinations. The department does not offer a free-standing terminal M.A. degree.

The application deadline for Fall 2025 admission is December 1, 2024. Applicants for whom the $95 application fee presents a financial hardship are encouraged to apply for a fee waiver from the Graduate School.

Foreign applicants or applicants who do not qualify for a fee waiver from the Graduate School should contact [email protected] . These applicants should explain briefly in their email why the fee presents a financial hardship. Requests for a fee waiver will be assessed and forwarded to the College of Arts & Science. If a fee waiver is granted, the applicant will be notified.

Applicants should have an undergraduate degree from an accredited institution, domestic or international.

Application Components

As part of the online application, candidates will provide:

• Statement of Purpose (please be specific about your research goals and provide names of faculty members with whom you would like to work, and why. In addition, please explain how your interests and goals may connect with our Areas of Excellence ).
• A minimum of three letters of recommendation (and no more than five).
• An unofficial, scanned college transcript(s) and graduate transcript(s) if applicable. Admitted applicants will be instructed to submit official and final transcripts as a condition of enrollment at Vanderbilt.
• TOEFL and IELTS scores are accepted for international students whose native language is not English. For more information, read the Graduate School’s Language Proficiency policy.
• Candidates are required to upload a writing sample of no more than 25 pages as part of the online application process. The option to upload the writing sample is made available immediately after entering your test scores into the online application. Please note that until this writing sample has been uploaded, your application will be considered incomplete. Research papers and theses, especially those that explore a historical topic and show facility in using original and/or archival materials, are of most use to the admissions committee in making their decisions. Co-authored writing samples are not accepted.
• GRE scores are not required for admission.

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Areas of Excellence

Graduate students will select an area of excellence from a drop-down menu in the online application; prospective advisers will submit a note to the admissions committee explaining the candidate’s fit. Therefore, applicants are strongly encouraged to reach out to prospective advisors to figure out how their interests could connect with our areas of excellence initiative and to explain in their Statement of Purpose how they envision benefitting from it.

Economics: Labor, Business, Capitalism:

The Vanderbilt History Department offers a rich setting for the study of the history of economy, widely conceived, including labor and business history, the history of capitalism, trade networks, and general questions of economic development as they connect with politics, culture, religion, and social history. Ranging temporally from the classical/medieval era to the modern world, and geographically from the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, Europe and the United States, the Vanderbilt History faculty is interested in the study of commodities, thought, empire, trade, free and unfree labor, finance, cultures, and the global development of capitalism. Our view is capacious, with wide interest in legal, political, and regulatory regimes that influence such processes. Working with faculty across the department, we encourage comparative and transnational forms of historical inquiry. Vanderbilt also offers connections with a robust team of formal economic historians in the Economic Department and a strong undergraduate Economics-History major.

Legal History

Vanderbilt is home to a thriving community of legal historians. We range chronologically from the ancient Mediterranean to the twenty-first century, and our faculty and graduate students have written on topics as diverse as ancient violence, the history of prostitution, racial passing, citizenship, Islamic law, policing, capital punishment, sovereignty and state building, privacy law, American slavery, and the intersections of religion and law.

Our community is centered on the Legal History Colloquium, a trans-institutional seminar that brings together faculty and students from the Law School, the Divinity School, and the College of Arts & Sciences working on legal historical themes. The colloquium strives to be international and comparative in methods and scope. Students in Legal History take a graduate seminar on Methods in Legal History, which introduces them to the wide-range of work done by legal historians. Working in consultation with their adviser, students of legal history write one of their two graduate seminar papers on a legal topic; they also have opportunities to serve as teaching assistant to faculty in diverse areas of legal history.

Race & Diaspora

Vanderbilt’s History Department focuses on complex histories of racial formation, as well as race and migration. The unique history of African peoples dispersed by the Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades is of particular interest. Deploying local, national, transnational, and transdisciplinary approaches, students work closely with accomplished scholars in the History Department—as well as other academic departments, such as African American & Diaspora Studies—to study a wide array of interrelated topics.

These include race as a concept, ideology, and system, as well as the role of race in shaping identity and culture in the Americas and other parts of the world. Likewise, students examine theories of race & diaspora, encompassing historical phenomena such as settler colonialism, racial enslavement, labor migrations, deportation, colonialism, and post-colonialism. In addition, research can extend to the analysis of subsequent mass demographic movements and the creation of “new” racialized peoples, homelands, communities, cultures, and ideologies as historical groups responded to upheaval and sought opportunities. Therefore, scholarship on race and diaspora also attends to manifestations of social, religious, economic, and political oppression and social control, and the attendant struggles of resistance and adaptation. This, in turn, leads us to scrutinize race alongside state formation, racialized citizenship, capitalism, state-building, and surveillance. As with all work on race, centering analyses of gender and sexuality is a priority in order to provide a deeper understanding of racial identities and structures. In addition, examining race and diaspora from the ancient world through the 20th Century and in relationship to Native American, Asian, and Jewish diasporas is also possible.

Research Areas

Ancient/medieval.

Vanderbilt boasts a dynamic group of scholars in Ancient and Medieval history. The faculty represent a range of geographic and chronological periods, including the Roman Empire, Ancient/Medieval Syria, medieval Europe, Judaism, Islam and Asia. The faculty share a mutual interest in reconstructing past through rigorous, source-driven historical reconstruction, with specializations in legal, religious, economic, cultural and military history. They work closely with a distinguished cohort of early modern historians, and in collaboration with the programs in Classical and Mediterranean Studies, the Legal History Seminar, Jewish Studies, Women and Gender Studies, the Pre-Modern Cultural Studies seminar (Robert Penn Warren Center); the departments of English, French & Italian, German, Russian and East European Studies, History of Art, and the Graduate Department of Religion.

We welcome applications from potential graduate students interested both in particular subject areas, but also in the questions and methods shared by all historians of pre-modern societies – how to work with patchy or fragmentary evidence, how to reconstruct the world of culture and symbols, how to push beyond the learned texts that predominate in our records, and how to ask meaningful questions about the past.

There is no prescribed graduate curriculum; students are invited to craft their own program within the framework of the History Department Ph.D. requirements during coursework. Particular scrutiny is given, in evaluating applications, to a candidate’s prior preparation (including knowledge of languages necessary to undertake Ph.D. level research) and a candidate’s writing sample. Applicants are encouraged to contact potential supervisors in advance.

Vanderbilt University's History Department continues to diversify geographically and thematically, with African history being the latest doctoral field to be added to our offerings. Our doctoral program in African history is designed to produce scholars and teachers who possess a simultaneously broad and deep knowledge of the African past. We train academic historians of Africa who are grounded in the historiographies, methodologies, and debates that animate the field, but who also recognize and account for Africa's connections to the rest of the world and to global events.

We welcome applications from prospective graduate students who desire rigorous training in the core historical methodologies as well as in ethnographic approaches to the African past. Graduate students will be trained to mine and make sense of archival, oral, ethnographic, linguistic, and other unconventional sources as well as to utilize clues offered by Africa's vast material culture to reconstruct and interrogate the past. The goal is to develop our students into producers of new knowledge about Africa and effective teachers of African history.

Students can expect to be trained in the social, economic, and political histories of the continent while exploring themes as diverse as gender, technology, trade, religion, colonialism, nationalism, healing practices, slavery, intellectual production, among others. Students will be trained to appreciate the dominant dynamics of Africa's precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial histories while recognizing the parallels and overlaps between these periods. Our courses explore trans-regional patterns but also cover the peculiar historical features of particular regions.

The small number of our Africanist faculty means that we are able to devote considerable time to independent studies, collaborative learning, and mentorship. We perform traditional mentoring tasks, but we are also able to provide consistent support as students identify research fields, apply for research grants, and apply for jobs during the dissertation phase of their training.

Vanderbilt hosts an accomplished faculty in Asian history and is particularly strong in the twentieth century, early modern, and medieval periods. We emphasize global interconnections and broad comparative approaches both within the department and in affiliated programs across campus.

With a small cohort admitted each year, students benefit from close mentorship with Asia faculty, including one-on-one independent study and directed research. Students will be expected to take history department courses in other regions (Europe, US, Latin America, Middle East, Africa) and methodologies (including Visual Culture, Spatial Histories, Empire, and History of Science). Students can also explore related topics with Asia faculty in History of Art, languages and literature (Asian Studies), Religious Studies, Sociology, English, and Political Science.

South Asia: Vanderbilt is emerging as an important location for the study of early modern and modern South Asia, especially in the fields of political history, religious history, and the history of western India ( Samira Sheikh ). Graduate students admitted to study South Asian history may be supported by faculty in related fields, such as Indian Ocean history ( Tasha Rijke-Epstein ), the history of the British empire ( Catherine Molineux ), and the Islamic world ( Leor Halevi ,  David Wasserstein ). Distinguished South Asia specialists elsewhere at Vanderbilt include Tony K. Stewart, Adeana McNicholl and Anand Vivek Taneja in Religious Studies, Tariq Thachil in Political Science, Akshya Saxena in English, and Heeryoon Shin in History of Art. Those interested in premodern links between India and east Asia may benefit from scholars of Buddhism and Chinese architecture (Robert Campany/Tracy Miller).

Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Northeast Asia: With specialists in the cultural and intellectual history of modern/contemporary Japan ( Gerald Figal ,  Yoshikuni Igarashi ) and modern China/Northeast Asia ( Ruth Rogaski ), Vanderbilt is an excellent place to train in topics such as colonialism and empire, war, history and memory, contemporary culture, and history of the body and medicine. Faculty in U.S. History ( Tom Schwartz ,  Paul Kramer ) also maintain strong interests in Sino-U.S. relations. Associated faculty include Guojun Wang in Chinese literature, Lijun Song in Chinese medical sociology, and Brett Benson in contemporary Chinese politics.

Early and Middle-period Imperial China: Vanderbilt hosts a strong faculty in the political organization, military history, and material culture of the Song dynasty ( Peter Lorge ), with the capacity for comparative study in other medieval societies (Europe, Middle East, South Asia). Students can also explore topics as diverse as sacred landscapes, regional networks, and religious identities with affiliated faculty in History of Art (Tracy Miller) and Chinese religions (Rob Campany).

Atlantic World

Vanderbilt ranks among the nation's top twenty research universities and boasts a diverse and dynamic History Department. One of the newest and most exciting areas of faculty research and graduate training at Vanderbilt is Atlantic World History. Graduate students who choose to complete a major or minor field in Atlantic World history at Vanderbilt will be introduced to a wide range of literature addressing the interactions among European, Native American, and African peoples. Working closely with our Atlantic World historians, students develop a dissertation topic and prospectus during their fifth and sixth semesters.

From their first semester, we encourage doctoral students in our field to become actively engaged in the profession through field research, networking, collaborative projects, grant writing and publishing. We also encourage training in digital humanities and our students have worked on projects such as the  Slave Societies Digital Archive , the  Manuel Zapata Olivella Collection  and  Enslaved: Peoples of the Historic Slave Trade .

Our students have presented their research at numerous national and international conferences including the American Historical Association, the Conference on Latin American History, the Brazilian Studies Association, the Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction, the Omohundro Institute of Early American History, the African History Association, and the Association of Caribbean History, among others. Over the last decade our students have won many prestigious research awards, including the Fulbright, Social Science Research Council, American Council for Learned Societies, and Rotary fellowships.  Our students have conducted research in areas as diverse as Angola, Barbados, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Germany, Ghana, Jamaica, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Sweden.

Graduates of our Atlantic World History program have earned tenure-track positions in history departments at the University of Wisconsin, the University of Florida, Michigan State University, the University of West Florida, the University of Birmingham, UK, the University of Arkansas, Queens College, Georgia Gwinnett College and the University of Texas-Arlington.

Early Modern

Vanderbilt has a vibrant group of scholars in Early Modern history. Faculty research and teaching interests include geographic specialists in England/Britain, France, Germany, Italy, eastern Europe, India, and China. Among the areas of inquiry are legal, religious, economic, cultural, and gender/sexuality history. The Early Modern faculty work closely with historians of antiquity and medieval history, and in collaboration with the programs in Classical and Mediterranean Studies, Jewish Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, the departments of English, French and Italian, and German, Russian and East European Studies, History of Art, and the Pro-Modern Cultural Studies Seminar (Robert Penn Warren Center.)

We welcome applications from potential graduate students interested in particular subject areas as well as in the questions and methods shared by all historians of early modern societies, including how to work with incomplete, fragmentary, or (deliberately) misleading evidence, how to reconstruct the world of culture and symbols, how to push beyond the learned texts that predominate in the historical record, and how to ask meaningful questions about the past.

There is no prescribed graduate curriculum; students are invited to craft their own program within the framework of the History Department Ph.D. requirements during coursework, but an applicant’s prior preparation, including knowledge of languages necessary to undertake Ph.D. level research, and the writing sample, are particularly important factors. Applicants are encouraged to contact potential supervisors in advance.

Vanderbilt University trains graduate students in all periods of Islam's history, from its origins in late antiquity to modernity, and in various regional settings.

Our faculty works in multiple fields, including law, business, religion, imperialism, and nationalism. They have written on topics as diverse as early Islamic death rituals; politics and society in al-Andalus; Jewish-Muslim trade in the medieval Mediterranean; the political, religious and economic landscape of early modern Gujarat; Jewish identity in the Ottoman Empire; Islam in the modern Balkans; Nigerian responses to colonialism; and the rise of ISIS.

Latin America

Vanderbilt University has one of the oldest programs in Latin American studies in the United States. Our doctoral program focuses on developing scholars and teachers with both a broad knowledge of Latin American and Caribbean history and intensive training in research and writing in their specialty. Doctoral students normally do four semesters of classes, then take their qualifying exams at the end of their fourth semester or the beginning of their fifth semester. Working closely with our historians of Latin America and the Caribbean, students develop a dissertation topic and prospectus during their fifth semester. From their first semester, we encourage our doctoral students to become actively engaged in the profession through field research, networking, publishing, collaborative projects, and grant applications. Our students have presented their research at numerous national and international conferences including the American Historical Association, Conference on Latin American History, Latin American Studies Association, Brazilian Studies Association, Association of Caribbean Historians, and the Southern Historical Association. Over the last decade our students have won many prestigious internal and external research awards (ACLS, Mellon, Boren, SSRC, and Fulbright). Since 1989, 39 students have entered our doctoral program. Twenty-three have completed their dissertations, and ten students are currently in the program. The average time to completion of dissertation has been six years. Close individual supervision of our students has been key to the timely and successful progress of our students. 

Vanderbilt University has a distinguished tradition in Latin American and Caribbean history beginning with the hiring of Alexander Marchant (and four other Brazil specialists) and the creation of an Institute of Brazilian Studies in 1947. Among other noted historians of Latin America who have taught at Vanderbilt are Simon Collier, Robert Gilmore, J. León Helguera, and Barbara Weinstein. Close individual supervision of our students has been key to the timely and successful progress of our students.

Vanderbilt is home to a thriving community of legal historians. Our faculty expertise ranges from ancient Rome to the contemporary United States, and we place a strong emphasis on comparative and thematic inquiry. Faculty have written on topics as diverse as ancient violence, the history of prostitution, racial passing, Islamic law, American slavery, and law in early modern empires.

Our community is centered on the Legal History Workshop, an invited speaker series that runs throughout the year. The workshop features some of the most exciting new perspectives on legal history and strives to be international and comparative in methods and scope.

In addition to coursework in their geographic and chronological areas of expertise, students are encouraged to take the Methods in Legal History seminar, which runs every other year. This team-taught seminar introduces students to the range of work done by legal historians and runs in conjunction with the workshop.

Modern Europe

Vanderbilt's doctoral program in Modern Europe focuses on developing scholars and teachers with a broad knowledge of European history and its relationship to the world. Graduate students are rigorously trained in both the national historiographies of their regional and linguistic specializations, as well as in related transnational and thematic fields, such as environmental history, nationalism and nation-building, law and empire, the history of music, minority politics, history of religion, mass violence, and the history of science and technology.

With a small, competitive cohort accepted each year, doctoral students in Modern Europe at Vanderbilt benefit from close mentor relationship with their advisors and other senior faculty, both through small seminar-style coursework and close individual supervision during the dissertation process. Mentorship extends beyond the classroom to include support in grant-writing, preparation for the job market, and opportunities for teaching assistantships in related fields. Collectively, the department's European faculty has supervised more than 40 theses in modern Europe and helped to place students in prestigious fellowships and tenure-track jobs in the United States and Europe.

Science, Technology, and Medicine

Vanderbilt is home to a robust and diverse community of historians engaged in the study of Science, Technology, and Medicine (STM). Students in STM are exposed to both the intensive historiographies of STM fields as well as a broad and deep training in the relevant historical locations and periods. Vanderbilt STM students are encouraged to imagine themselves as both scholars and as historians.

Our faculty expertise ranges across time, place, and topic; from material culture in Africa, to medicine in China, to intellectual and cultural history in the West.  Faculty have written on topics as diverse as modern privacy, the young Darwin, Diabetes, Albert Einstein, Qi, clinical trials—even the future of technology.

Our community is centered on two workshops, one designed by graduate students for the STM scholars within the department, and the other designed to engage the broader Vanderbilt community, recognizing the inherently interdisciplinary nature of STM studies.  

United States

Students in our doctoral program are trained broadly in the historiography of the United States in the nineteenth, twentieth, and now twenty-first centuries. They also have ample opportunities to work in transnational and thematic fields, including African American history, diplomatic history, environmental history, intellectual history, legal history, political history, and religious history as well as the history of capitalism, gender and sexuality, popular culture, race and racism, and science, medicine, and technology. The department has a strong profile in the field of U.S. and the world, and offers students training in transnational approaches. Graduate students and faculty meet regularly as a group to discuss research work in progress in the department's informal Americanist Seminar.

With a small, diverse cohort accepted each year, doctoral students in U.S. history at Vanderbilt benefit from expert supervision and guidance. Our faculty is committed to excellent mentoring in both research and teaching. Graduate students enjoy close working relationships with their advisors and other faculty inside and outside the department, whether in the Law School or Peabody College of Education or in the departments of medicine, health and society, sociology, philosophy, or religious studies. Faculty assist students as well with grant-writing, conference presentations, article drafting, and preparation for the job market. The department has helped to place students in prestigious fellowships and tenure-track jobs as well as significant research and policy positions outside the academy.

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• PhD History
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The Department of History offers a PhD program centered on rigorous research within a vibrant and diverse intellectual community. While most of our students have a history degree (BA) or degrees (BA and MA), we accept students with a variety of backgrounds and interests. 

Admission is highly competitive. All offers include a full university fellowship for the duration of the program. Between 2017 and 2024, a number of excellent students selected for admission were named  Neubauer Family Distinguished Doctoral Fellows and received additional fellowship support over for five years.

Admissions Deadline (Autumn 2025 program start):  December 5, 2024 at 11:55 

Application Process

Interested students apply to the PhD program through the  Division of the Social Sciences . For questions regarding the application submission and fee waivers, please contact  SSD Admissions.  For questions regarding the History PhD Program or History-specific application components, please contact our  graduate affairs administrator .

Official decisions are sent by the Social Science Admissions Office by late February. The Department cannot release any information on admissions decisions.

Application Advice

The requirements for the application can be found on the divisional  admissions pages . The following advice is specific to your application to the Department of History.

Your  writing sample  should be a complete self-contained work. The ideal sample should be in the field of history (or a closely related field) that you plan to pursue at Chicago. Include the class or publication for which the sample was written. We do not have a page or word limit for writing samples. For papers longer than thirty pages, please flag a section for the committee.

Your  candidate statement  provides us with vital insight into the intersection of your intellectual goals and personal trajectory. It should communicate: 1) the ambitions you wish to pursue through doctoral work in history; 2) the specific questions and themes that will shape your dissertation research; 3) the personal and intellectual trajectory that has brought you to those themes and questions and prepared you to pursue them; and 4) the reasons that the University of Chicago and its faculty are well-matched to your doctoral plans.

The most helpful  letters of recommendation  come from faculty members who can assess your ability to work on your proposed historical topic.

Prospective students are asked to identify one or two primary fields of scholarly interest from a list in the application. Our faculty pages are sorted by field. Please see those pages for more information on faculty working in your field of interest. Please note, however, that we highly encourage applicants who work across field boundaries and do not apportion admissions by field.

There is no minimum  foreign language requirement  to enter the program, but successful applicants should possess strong language skills in their proposed research language(s) and be aware of the  language requirements for the various fields . All students are required to take a language exam in the first quarter of the program.

The University sets the  English-language assessment  requirements. Refer to the  Division of the Social Sciences  for English-language requirements and waivers.

Submission of  GRE scores  is entirely optional. Those who choose not to submit scores will not be disadvantaged in the admissions process.

MA Program Consideration

All applicants who are not admitted to our PhD program are automatically forwarded for consideration by our MA programs, unless the applicant specifically opts out of this process on their application. That said, as referred applications are considered later than most other MA applications, scholarship assistance for students admitted to an MA program through the referral process may be limited. If you are interested in our MA programs and would need scholarship assistance to attend, we would encourage you to apply directly to the MA as well as our program (note that this would require a separate application and application fee). MA applications are accepted  multiple times per year  with decisions typically issued within 6 to 8 weeks. Questions about applying to an MA program should be directed to  [email protected] .

Campus Visits

We encourage prospective students to reach out to potential faculty mentors through email. Please consult our faculty page to find professors who share your interests. Our graduate affairs administrator can provide additional information about the program.

The University also offers  graduate campus tours  throughout the year that are led by graduate students. Please check their website for campus visitor updates.

Admitted PhD students are invited to visit campus for "History Day" at the beginning of Spring Quarter.

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The Graduate Program

Columbia has been one of the most important centers of graduate education in history since modern Ph.D. programs began in America over a century ago. Recipients of our degrees hold distinguished positions in virtually every major university in the United States, and in many abroad. Our program offers a broad education in most areas of historical scholarship and attempts to train students for a discipline and a profession in the midst of considerable change. That includes not simply assisting students in acquiring the knowledge and skills essential to becoming contributing scholars, but also helping them to become effective teachers and to exist comfortably within a demanding and complicated professional world.

The members of our faculty represent many different approaches to the study of the past, and we strive to attract students of similarly diverse interests and commitments. No one should feel that being at Columbia requires accepting any one approach to the study of history.

This part of our website is designed to provide both prospective and current students with answers to some of the many questions they may have about the department.

Admissions answers commonly-asked questions about our admissions process.

Under Ph.D. Fields you will find information about the separate fields of study available in our program and the relationship among them.

Fellowships and Financial Aid explains the various ways we provide our students with fellowships and financial aid.

Dissertations-in-Progress summarizes the course of study towards the Ph.D and highlights the work of our students.

Research awards and recent honors are showcased in Award Announcements .

The section entitled Placement sketches how we prepare our students for the academic job market and reports on how our students have done in that market in recent years.

In the Graduate Handbook , we explain our curriculum and our academic requirements and provide more detailed information about aspects of the program such as the MA, Orals, M.Phil., Dissertations, etc.

Our FAQs are useful for students seeking admission as well as for current students seeking quick information.

The Annual Newsletter keeps us informed about our students.

College of Arts & Sciences

PhD Program

For Academic Year 2024-25 : Director of Doctoral Studies : Prof. Katie Benton-Cohen Graduate Programs Manager : Carolina Madinaveitia

Welcome to Georgetown’s Ph.D. program in History! We are a top-notch program with strengths in multiple fields , and we encourage students with interests that span geographical regions, time periods, and thematic foci.  Our doctoral student community numbers roughly 100, with new cohorts of 10-12 fully-funded students each year. Our alumni have gone on to distinguished careers as historians in and out of the academy.

Our Ph.D. program has much to offer. In addition to the attention of a distinguished and award-winning History faculty, our students benefit from Georgetown’s many regional studies programs and intellectual centers, where interdisciplinary activity is prized. Opportunities for language training abound. No city has greater resources for historians than Washington, D.C.: the Library of Congress, the National Archives, the National Library of Medicine, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and many other institutions hold an unparalleled wealth of research material.

Our doctoral program is collegial and collaborative, with a vibrant intellectual life. Outside of class, students participate in seminars and conferences along with faculty, share in the activities of our Institute for Global History, grow through professional development workshops, and socialize with each other when the academic day is over. It’s a fun place to be a serious historian.

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Note that the GRE is now optional for our graduate admission process.  

Admissions process for the history phd:.

Each year the department receives nearly 400 applications to the doctoral program and offers admission to about 6% of applicants . The typical incoming class size is 16 students.

The admissions process is extremely competitive , but if you are serious about pursuing a PhD in history, you are encouraged to apply.

Successful applications have shared many of the following characteristics:

Statement of purpose that makes clear why the applicant wants to study history in graduate school, and why the applicant wants to study at Harvard. This statement often illustrates the applicant’s research interests and notes potential advisors Three strong letters of reference from people who know the applicant’s writing Personal Statement that shares how the applicant’s experiences or activities will contribute to the school’s mission to attract a diverse and dynamic community. (Should not exceed 500 words.) Writing sample of remarkable quality that asks historical questions Fluent or nearly fluent in English Reading ability in two languages other than English Strong undergraduate , and, if applicable, graduate record , with excellent marks in history courses

Follow the link for more information about applying to the  History Department PhD program

Harvard Griffin GSAS does not discriminate against applicants or students on the basis of race, color, national origin, ancestry or any other protected classification.

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The PhD program in History is one of the leading programs in the country that specifically emphasizes World History as a primary field. The department’s 19 full-time faculty members offer courses spanning the globe: from Asia to Africa to Latin America to Europe to the United States. Interdisciplinary and multidimensional, the program has particular strengths in legal, economic, gender, social, and education history.

In The News

Dr. Kabria Baumgartner Earns the Award of Excellence from the American Association for State and Local History

Victoria Dey, World History PhD Student, Awarded Fulbright Fellowship to France, 2024 – 2025

ACIS Larkin Fellowship

Its innovative curriculum and the faculty’s state-of-the-art research in Digital Humanities further distinguish Northeastern nationally. With rigorous training in historiography and methodology, Northeastern PhDs have consistently won prestigious awards and hold tenure-track positions at research institutions and liberal arts colleges nationally.

Emphasizing global approaches to historical study, the PhD program encourages students to think beyond national boundaries, comparatively, and in terms of themes that span geographically dispersed areas of the world-trade, migration, disease, religion, state formation, colonialism, and post-colonialism. Studies also include long-term historical processes, major global transformations, and interactions between states and colonial societies.

Candidates for the PhD in history may examine African, Asian, European, Latin American, or U.S. history in a world historical context. The program emphasizes mentoring of students in their courses, supervised teaching, and in the doctoral dissertation. Systematic training in theory and methodology and preparation for college teaching are distinctive features of the Northeastern program. All doctoral students undertake intensive reading in the theoretical literature that informs historical analysis, as well as in global historiography. Each student develops a deliberate methodological focus in an area such as cultural history, social history, environmental and biological history, or public history. Students are mentored in the practice of teaching and are encouraged to lecture and lead discussion sections under the supervision of faculty.

The Department of History maintains close ties with interdisciplinary programs such as Asian Studies; Latino, Latin American, and Caribbean Studies; Law and Public Policy; Women Gender and Sexuality Studies; and with the Departments of African American Studies; Art and Architecture; English; Sociology and Anthropology; and Political Science. Graduate students may obtain a certificate in Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies. All doctoral candidates must develop and demonstrate a strong reading knowledge of the languages in which they will undertake research. In cases where students require training in languages not offered at Northeastern, the department helps them arrange to take courses at nearby institutions. The doctoral dissertation presents an original interpretation of a topic of historical significance based on detailed research into primary sources, a survey of the relevant literature, and skilled application of the theoretical and methodological apparatus germane to the topic.

Learn more about the PhD program in History program from the College of Social Sciences and Humanities .

• One of few PhD programs in the country that specifically emphasizes world history as a primary field of study
• Geographical specialization and foreign language study are required
• All PhD candidates participate in formal college teaching preparation
• Students may enter the program from a Bachelor’s or Master’s level
• Students in the Ph.D program generally receive funding for five years

Northeastern University’s PhD in World History program prepares research historians to teach at the college and university level. The program’s objectives include:

• Global approaches: Focus on global, transnational, and comparative history, including long-term historical processes, major global transformations, and interactions between states and colonial societies.
• Theory and methodology: Provide systematic training in theory and methodology.
• College teaching preparation: Prepare students for college teaching.
• Area studies: Allow candidates to examine African, Asian, European, Latin American, or U.S. history in a world-historical context.
• Mentoring: Emphasize mentoring of students in their courses, supervised teaching, and in the doctoral dissertation.

Graduates of Northeastern’s PhD program have gone on to work in a range of academic programs and fields around the country and the world. Graduates who have earned a PhD are currently teaching and conducting research at various institutions, including Oberlin College, Butler University, Delaware State University, the National University of Singapore, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, and the American University in Cairo, to name a few.  The diversity of these positions, as well as their prestige, speaks to the quality of graduate education at Northeastern University.

Our graduates pursue careers within academia and beyond, including:

• University of California, Berkeley; Center for Middle Eastern Studies
• Boston College
• Macalester College
• University of Pittsburgh
• Bates College
• George Mason University
• Merrimack College
• The American University in Cairo

Application Materials

Application.

• Application fee – US $100
• Personal statement
• Unofficial transcripts from all institutions attended
• English proficiency for international applicants
• Three letters of recommendation
• Scores from the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) – Optional
• Writing sample

Admissions deadline: December 1

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History, PhD

The Graduate Program in History at the University of Pennsylvania has a long tradition of distinction. Beginning as one of the first programs in the United States to offer doctoral study in history, (the first Ph.D. in History was conferred in 1891); the Department continues to pioneer new areas of scholarship. In the last twenty years, faculty members of the departments in American, European, and World History have assumed a leading role in their fields. Today, few departments in the country match Penn's Department of History in coverage and depth across the entire range of history from medieval times to the present.

For more information: http://www.history.upenn.edu/graduate/program-guidelines

View the University’s Academic Rules for PhD Programs .

Sample Plan of Study

The total course units required for graduation is 14.

Program Milestones

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The degree and major requirements displayed are intended as a guide for students entering in the Fall of 2024 and later. Students should consult with their academic program regarding final certifications and requirements for graduation.

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Top 10 Best History PhD Programs in 2024

History helps us understand societies and allows humanity to learn from patterns and past mistakes.

Many are fascinated and enamored by history, leading to a passion that makes them want to know more.

If you’re a history lover thinking about further deepening your knowledge and establishing a career in the field, a PhD in the subject may be for you. The list of history PhD programs below contains some of the best available in the United States.

Table of Contents

Best PhD Programs in History

North dakota state university.

• North Dakota Residents $405/credit
• Minnesota Residents $514.58
• Non-US Students $607.77
• International Students $709.07

The North Dakota State University has offered its master’s degree in history since 1954. It wasn’t until 2002 that it began offering a PhD program in History. NDSU’s PhD program commonly takes three to five years to finish for full-time students, although it is not uncommon for some students to take longer.

Admission is available year-round, and applicants are required to provide GRE scores. International students whose first language is not English must pass the TOEFL. To apply for the PhD program, you must already have a master’s degree in history or hold one from another closely-related field.

There are limited funding and financial aid  opportunities available at NDSU, primarily as assistantships with tuition waivers and small stipends. This funding is renewable for four years for PhD students, provided academic requirements are met.

Unfortunately, if you’re looking for a program that allows distance learning, you will not find it in NDSU. NDSU also requires one year of residency on campus.

Boston College – Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences

• Your full-time PhD studies at Boston College will be fully paid for by tuition remissions with the expectation of good grades and an obligation to complete research/teaching assistantships and teaching fellowships.
• You may also get stipends of up to $35,875 per year.

Boston College offers masters and PhD degrees in different history specialties, with British, medieval, modern European, and United States history as some of their strongest. There are also other graduate studies interests in South Asian, East Asian, and Latin American history, and the history of religion.

Earning your PhD at Boston College means you can expect small class sizes that allow for individual and specialized attention. This institution’s program also allows for flexibility, although you are expected to complete your studies full-time.

Boston College is located in one of the best academic life centers globally, allowing students to network and collaborate with other universities through their studies.

University of Texas Arlington

• $10,828 per year in-state

The University of Texas Arlington offers students an on-campus PhD program that they can participate in part-time or full-time. Full-time course loads are nine credit hours per term, and full-time students are expected to complete their doctoral degrees within six years, while part-time students may take longer.

To apply for the PhD program at the University of Texas Arlington, you must have a BA or MA in history or  a minimum of eighteen hours of upper-division history courses during your undergrad. You must also provide your GRE scores.

The PhD in history program at the University of Texas Arlington specializes in transatlantic, transnational, and global history approaches focusing on US, European, Latin American, Transatlantic, and Transnational history. The award-winning faculty at this institution provides personalized attention to small class sizes.

The University of Texas Arlington has North America’s only specialized History of Cartography track that provides students access to the Garrett Map Collection , a world-famous map library.

Alumni of the program often establish careers as educators. They may find work as museum professionals or archival administration specialists outside of academia. They may also work for nonprofits or the government, and enjoy careers involving writing, research, and analysis at the highest level.

The University of Texas at Dallas  – PhD in History of Ideas

• $18,276 per semester

The University of Texas at Dallas offers something a little different — a PhD in History of Ideas. This PhD program was designed specifically for those who want to do advanced research or teach at a college level or higher. It concentrates on the study of philosophy as well as intellectual and cultural history with a focus on European and American history.

Students of this program can expect a flexible interdisciplinary approach to their studies that connects among specific areas of interest. Aside from their coursework in the History of Ideas, students must also attend two seminars each for visual & performance arts and literature.

Alumni of this program may become teachers and educators. They can also become curators of museums or historical sites. Other potential careers are research, history administrator, and archivist. Additionally, graduates of this program can work as managers of public or private historical organizations and work for governments or non-profit organizations.

University of California –  Santa Cruz

• $13,850 in-state
• $28,952 out-of-state

The University of California Santa Cruz offers an on-campus history PhD program that emphasizes a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approach to the study of history with a transnational and global orientation.

UCSC provides a rigorous program that blends instruction and independent work with the intent of training students in original historical research techniques. Students are encouraged to think innovatively and trained to talk, think, and teach beyond boundaries. This program prepares its students to teach university-level courses while also providing them with the tools they need to succeed in careers outside of academia.

The University of California’s Department of History, as well as its Santa Cruz campus, is well-known for its many strengths including:

• Gender, Sexuality, & Feminist Studies
• Colonialism
• Critical Race Studies
• Internationalism
• Nationalism
• Decolonial and Postcolonial Studies
• Class & Transnational Labor Studies

Admission to UCSC’s history PhD program is highly competitive. The institution states that they only admit the most qualified, highly motivated applicants and welcome and encourage diversity in their student body.

Note: The University of California Santa Cruz no longer requires applicants to provide GRE scores.

Indiana University – Bloomington

• Indiana residents:  full-time direct costs $25,406/total estimated costs $33,272
• Non-Indiana residents: full-time direct costs $45,594/total estimated costs $53,460

​​Indiana University Bloomington has one of the largest libraries and history departments in the United States, making it one of the top choices for those interested in a future career in the field. This institution provides one of the best history doctoral programs nationwide taught by 50+ talented faculty members.

According to the program itself, Indiana University Bloomington is dedicated to training first-class historians for careers in and out of the classroom. Despite having a larger faculty, classes remain small in size so that students can receive individualized attention and advisor support.

Interested students may apply for a PhD directly without having a master’s degree. Admitted students are allowed seven years to complete their coursework and another seven years for their dissertation. However, students commonly finish their studies at a much faster pace than the allowance.

Provided they qualify, students in need of financial aid can find it by working as an associate instructor, course assistant, research assistant, or editorial assistant. Fellowships and grants are also within reach for those interested enough to apply.

New York University (Arts & Science)

• $50,638 per year
• Most new students at the NYU GSAS receive multi-year funding through the Henry M. MacCracken Program  that offers four/five-year award terms, tuition remission for degree-required courses, health insurance, a nine-month living expenses stipend OR research assistantship, and a one-time $1,000 grant that students can use at their discretion.

New York University’s Graduate School of Arts and Science, founded over a century ago in 1886, is one of the oldest schools in the US that offers doctoral degrees. It has one of the best history PhDs available in the country.

Earning your PhD at NYU GSAS means you’ll need to commit to full-time studies of 12 points per semester. A PhD is 72 points, and students must complete 24 units within the first three years of their studies.

Learning is on-campus and there are no distance-learning opportunities at this time.

The history PhD program at the New York University Graduate School of Arts and Science is research-focused. Its main objective is to develop students’ professional skills in historical research and teaching history. This objective prepares students for an eventual career in academia or research. It also prepares future graduates, part of the job hopping generation , for other jobs such as archival management.

NYU GSAS’s major areas of study include but are not limited to:

• African Diaspora
• African History
• Atlantic History
• East Asian History
• Latin American and Caribbean History
• Medieval European History
• Early Modern European History
• South Asian History
• United States History

*Interested students do not need to take the GRE if they apply for a standalone master’s or PhD in history. However, applying to joint PhD studies will require GRE results.

*International students whose first language is not English must pass the TOEFL.

Rutgers (School of Arts & Science)

• New Jersey residents:  $19,724/year
• Non-New Jersey residents:  $32,132/year

Rutgers offers funding opportunities for qualified students in the form of partial or complete tuition remission and a stipend of up to $25,000 disbursed annually. Students eligible for this aid are obligated to complete fellowships and assistantships throughout their studies.

The history PhD program at the Rutgers School of Arts and Science was designed for full-time study, taking 5 years on average. The distinguished faculty of more than 60 historians cover all sorts of areas of study and time periods, though they have strong specializations in traditional regional, thematic, transnational, comparative, cultural-intellectual, social history, and more.

Students in the program publish their research and scholarly work relatively often in major historical journals. They also present their research both nationally and internationally.

This institution’s history PhD programs such as women’s and gender history, modern U.S. history, and African-American history are often some of the most top-ranked nationwide.

University of California Berkeley

• Admitted students receive a fully-funded fellowship that includes tuition and fee remission, insurance, and an additional stipend.
• In the following years, students receive a salary and a stipend during teaching assistantships and instructorships.
• A department research year grant is also awarded alongside a stipend.
• To find out more, see their financial aid page here .

UC Berkeley’s history department is one of the top-ranked in the USA, and it offers one of the best PhD history programs in the nation.

Students learn from award-winning faculty members who have won some of the most prestigious awards in the field, including the MacArthur “Genius Award” and more. The faculty and their research cover practically everything — most of the globe and almost all of humanity’s recorded history.

The PhD program at UC Berkeley is well-known for cultural history, but it also specializes in the history of science, political history, religious history, economic history, urban history, and more.

It prepares students in four fields of study:

• Three selected fields in history (first, second, and third)
• One outside field in another discipline

UC Berkeley is committed to diversity in its student body and accepts students from all over the world.

University of Michigan (College of Literature, Science & Arts)

• The plan involves six terms of fellowship support and six years of appointment as a grad student instructor or GSI.
• Students also receive summer support for the first four years.
• After the six years are over, there are additional funding opportunities  possible.

The history PhD program at the University of Michigan has an interdisciplinary, global, and multidimensional approach to student education and training. It is regularly among the top-ranked history departments in the United States, which is a testament to the quality of education the diverse students receive here.

The program combines innovative teaching by the institution’s talented faculty with state-of-the-art research and techniques. The aim is to provide students training and preparation in their research fields, allowing them to succeed in their careers in or out of academia.

After graduation, alumni of this program enjoy relatively great placement numbers. The institution reports that only three out of nineteen graduates say they are unemployed or have no opportunities upon graduation in the past two years.

Because of the generous funding package and bright future for alumni, this program is extremely competitive. It receives around 350-400 applications for only eighteen open slots per year. It’s also worth mentioning that the average master’s GPA for applicants is 3.87.

Students must complete one year (18 credits) of the program in residence on-campus and complete the entire program within six to seven years.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many years does it take to get a phd in history.

One of the main deterrents of earning any PhD is the time investment involved. The same applies to students who are earning their doctorate in history. According to Historians.org , the average time to finish a PhD in history programs is roughly eight years.

As a history PhD candidate , your program expects you to enroll in a minimum of three academic years for your graduate studies, known as your “residence.” Another common expectation is that PhD students should spend at least one year of residency at the university or institution awarding them the doctorate.

Despite requiring only three years of residence, it’s extremely rare for candidates to finish this quickly. Candidates must also fulfill the other important requirements, such as their dissertations, which often take around four years to complete.

Do I need a master’s in history to get a PhD in History?

If you’re thinking about applying for a PhD history program, you might be relieved to know that you don’t always need a master’s in history to qualify. For some educational institutions, the minimum educational attainment interested applicants need is a bachelor’s degree. However, there may be other requirements to apply, such as entrance exams, proof of interest in history, and recommendation letters.

The best thing you can do is find out whether the program you’re interested in requires a master’s degree before you apply.

How much does a history PhD cost?

The amount you pay per year may vary depending on where you choose to do your PhD.

On average, doctorates can cost as much as $30,000/year in tuition costs alone. Multiply that by eight years, and you may be paying $240,000 in total — not including any other costs incurred along the way.

If that amount sends you reeling, it might give you some relief to know that many of the best history PhD programs offer full funding and stipends to all admitted students.

There are also PhD programs in history that cost only half to a third of this amount overall.

How competitive are history PhD programs?

Those who have earned their history PhDs may tell you that the job market can be a challenge due to the limited number of positions available. The tight job market also means a more competitive admissions process, where it can be difficult to get into the PhD history programs of your choice. For example, some programs get almost four hundred applicants with fewer than twenty spots to fill.

Wrapping Up: Is a PhD in History for You?

The answer to this question depends on your preferences.

A PhD in History is often highly specialized, resulting in few career options upon graduation. However, those extremely passionate about the subject find extreme satisfaction in deepening their knowledge.

If you want a career in academia, or if you want to be working with history in some capacity in your job, a PhD may just be for you. Who knows, you may even qualify for a program that offers full funding!

Related Reading:

• Master’s in History: Ultimate Guide
• Top 5 Best PhD Programs in English
• Top 10 Highest Paying PhD Degrees
• Top 20 Online PhD Programs
• EdD vs PhD: Which One is Right For You?

Chriselle Sy

Chriselle has been a passionate professional content writer for over 10 years. She writes educational content for The Grad Cafe, Productivity Spot, The College Monk, and other digital publications.  When she isn't busy writing, she spends her time streaming video games and learning new skills.

• Chriselle Sy https://blog.thegradcafe.com/author/chriselle-sy/ When to Apply for Grad School: Easy Monthly Timeline [2026-2027]
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• Chriselle Sy https://blog.thegradcafe.com/author/chriselle-sy/ The Best Academic Planners for 2024/2025
• Chriselle Sy https://blog.thegradcafe.com/author/chriselle-sy/ Graduate Certificate vs Degree: What’s the Difference? [2024 Guide]

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Ph.D. Degree

Doctor of philosophy in history.

The period of time between a student's admission, or promotion, to the doctoral program, and advancement to candidacy for the Ph.D. degree in the General Examination is one devoted largely to study in the student's four fields. In addition to preparing the student for the General Examination, this work has two purposes: (1) to broaden the student's historical knowledge in preparation for a teaching career, and (2) to deepen the student's historical knowledge within an area of specialty in preparation for researching and writing the Ph.D. dissertation.

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The duration of the Ph.D. program is five to eight years. University and departmental regulations stipulate that the maximum tenure of graduate study at UCSD is eight years while seven years is the limit for receiving any type of university financial support. For the Department of History, the "normative" time to degree is 7 years.  Normally, during the first two years, students participate in courses, write two research papers, complete language requirements, define major and minor fields of study, and take at least one minor field examination. In the third year, the student normally completes all outstanding minor field and language requirements, defines a dissertation topic, and passes a qualifying examination in the major field, at which time the student officially advances to candidacy for the Ph.D. Advancement to candidacy must occur at least before the end of the third year. Department of History Ph.D. students will be expected to spend time between their first and sixth years doing archival and/or field research (involving travel outside of San Diego), as required by the demands of their research topic. They often spend their fifth to seventh years writing their dissertation, although exact travel requirements and time to degree varies depending on funding, preparation, and the requirements of the specific project.

Coursework Overview

Full-time enrollment.

In order to remain eligible for financial support, all graduate students must be enrolled in 12 units of upper-division (100-199) or graduate level (200 and above) courses during the regular academic year. 

Pre-Candidacy

First and foremost, all coursework should be chosen in consultation with your faculty advisor. During your first three years in the program your aim will be to fulfill the following requirements:

• Ph.D. Course Requirements (mainly major field requirements)
• Minor Field Requirement

Language Requirement

• MA on the Way Course Requirements

The course requirements for the Ph.D. and MA on the Way largely overlap and only represent about four quarters worth of coursework. The additional five quarters of coursework should be chosen in consultation with your faculty advisor. In some cases, you may take courses to fulfill requirements for the minor field or language requirements. Many of you will enroll in a 500 class and all of you will enroll in one or more HIGR 298s. Regardless, all the coursework completed while pre-candidacy should be taken in preparation for your Qualifying Exam (which you can also think of as your major field exam). 

Newly admitted students should consult with their faculty advisor about all coursework they plan to take throughout their time in the Ph.D. program. During their first quarter in the program, most students are encouraged to enroll as follows: 

• Research Seminar or another course chosen in consultation w/ your faculty advisor
• Major Field Historiography or another course chosen in consultation w/ your faculty advisor

In-Candidacy

At this stage in the program, enrollment in courses is less about what courses a student is taking and more about accounting for how the student is spending their time researching or teaching and accounting for the time of the faculty who are supporting them in writing their dissertation. Most students enroll in 8-12 units of HIGR 299 and/or 4 units of a 500 depending on how they are spending their time.

About Courses

Research Seminars Each field group offers at least one two-quarter research seminar each year so that students have the opportunity to take one research seminar each year, preferably during the first two years of study. The goal of these seminars is the writing of a research paper based on primary sources, and the identification of a potential dissertation topic. The model and the standard for the seminar papers is a monographic article that makes a scholarly contribution to the field. In the first quarter of the course, students read and research intensively; by the end of the quarter, they are expected to develop a prospectus for a research paper. When materials are not in English, it is assumed that the student can use the appropriate language in research. The instructor provides guidance on research methods and the appropriate bibliographic tools. The selection of the paper topic requires special care to ensure that the paper can be completed within the two quarters. In the second quarter, students write their papers and present them to the seminar. In addition, the instructors may encourage students to submit their research seminar papers to be presented at various conferences and/or to be published. Please see the  Field-Specific Curriculum below for a listing of field-specific research seminar courses.

Historiographies Each field group has a sequence of seminars, taught over the course of 1-2 years, designed to introduce students to the major works and important controversies in the field. Please see the  Field-Specific Curriculum below for a listing of field-specific Historiography courses.

Crossfield Courses In addition to the graduate courses offered by the Field Groups, the Department will offer at least one and up to three cross-field seminars each year (HIGR 200 – HIGR 209, HIGR 280-282, etc.).  These courses are designed to cross geographical and chronological boundaries.  All Ph.D. students are required to complete HIGR 200, usually during their first quarter of the program.

HIGR 298-Directed Reading This is a variable unit (may be taken for 1-12 units) independent study course that may be taken with a senate faculty member in the history department. It can be used to fulfill all of the requirements listed above if there is no other course offered in a given quarter to meet your particular research needs. It is most often used to account for the time a student is working on their prospectus in the quarters leading up to the qualifying exam. 

HIGR 299-PhD Thesis Direction HIGR 299 is also a variable unit (may be taken for 1-12 units) independent study course that a student enrolls in with their faculty advisor/committee chair or any other faculty member who is supporting them in writing their dissertation. In short, if a student is asking a faculty person to read a dissertation chapter or otherwise meeting with the student to discuss their dissertation research the student should be enrolled in HIGR 299 units with them. If a student is on fellowship doing research (in-residence or in-absentia) the expectation is that they are enrolled in 12 units of HIGR 299 with their faculty advisor/committee chair.

500 Courses 500 courses are the instructional component to Teaching Assistantships. In general, this course is meant to account for the time you will spend learning to be an instructor and preparing to teach. The level of instruction and support you will receive is dependent upon by whom a student is employed and the requirements and expectations of this course vary (so read that syllabus very closely). Usually, beginning in a student's second year they'll enroll in a 4 unit 500 course and 8 units of other course work. In the event you accept a TAship where a 500 course is not available, speak to your advisor and/or the Graduate Coordinator about an appropriate alternative.

Course Requirements

A normal full-time program consists of twelve units (or three four-unit courses) per quarter. Ph.D. students are expected to complete at least one of the following minimum formal courses of study prior to their qualifying examination:

(1) two two-quarter research seminars, three one-quarter historiography courses in the major field, and four other courses (which may be a combination of colloquia, conjoined courses, or directed readings, but which must include one cross-field graduate colloquium like HIGR 200).

1. Research Seminar (A)

2. Research Seminar (B)

3. Research Seminar (A)

4. Research Seminar (B)

5. Major Field Historiography

6. Major Field Historiography

7. Major Field Historiography

8. HIGR 200 

9. Elective

10. Elective

11. Elective

12. Elective

(2) three two-quarter research seminars (not necessarily in the same field), three one-quarter historiography courses in their major field, and three other courses (which may be a combination of colloquia, conjoined courses, or directed readings, but which must include one cross-field graduate colloquium like HIGR 200).

5. Research Seminar (A)

6. Research Seminar (B)

8. Major Field Historiography

9. Major Field Historiography

10. HIGR 200

Students are encouraged to take their first research seminar in their major field during the initial year of graduate study.

After the first year, most students' full-time program includes two regular academic courses each quarter (8 units), and enrollment in a 500 course (four units), like HIGR 500, as a component of a student's employment as a 50% Teaching Assistant.

Major Field

The major field book list should be drawn up by the student in consultation with the faculty adviser. Each major field list will reflect the unique interests of the student, while also incorporating core themes of the field. Some field groups have formal core lists that may comprise a part of each student’s total list, while others do not. In all cases, students are expected to organize their major field lists according to the specific themes/nations/issues that have informed their graduate study, since no major field list can be all-inclusive. The number of titles on a major field list should be around 100, with 80–120 titles representing a reasonable range.

The  exam  for the major field is the oral qualifying exam/advancement to candidacy. Unlike the minor field and language requirements, no documentation of completing the major field is needed ahead of the qualifying exam. 

Minor Field

Documenting completion of a minor field.

To document your fulfillment of a minor field please click the button to the right to fill out and route for signature the Report of the Minor Field Exam via DocuSign. You will need to enter:

• your name and email
• the name and email of the faculty member approving your minor field (contact them via email prior to sending the form so they know to expect it)
• the name and email of your faculty advisor

For reference:  Report of the Minor Field Exam (PDF)

Minor Field Completion Timeline

Ph.D. candidates are strongly encouraged to take at least one minor field examination by the end of the first year and to complete the second minor exam by the end of the second year.  All minor fields must be completed before the major field/oral qualifying exam can be taken.  

Minor Field Types

Generally, the department recognizes two types of minor fields:

Minor Field Reading Lists

The Minor field is defined by a reading list agreed upon by the student and the minor field adviser(s).  The list is intended to establish what will be expected of the student and to prevent confusion over the material to be covered. As a guideline, the reading list should:

• encompass about three quarters’ worth of coursework(which may be taken with up to three faculty members)
• include about 50 titles, with 40-70 titles representing a reasonable range, depending on the combination of books and articles.  
• be finalized at the beginning of the quarter during which the student plans to complete the minor field

Minor Field Evaluation

Completion or evaluation of a minor field takes several forms, depending on the policies of different field groups or individual professors.

• A one-hour oral examination
• A three-hour or twenty-four-hour take-home written exam
• An “un-timed” synthetic essay, 25-30 pages, that organizes the scholarship of the field
• Three shorter papers (8-10 pages) each encompassing a single quarter’s worth of reading. ( This option is especially appropriate in cases (like the Global History minor field) where the student is working with more than one faculty member on a minor field. )
• Developing a course syllabus in the field

Minor Exam Failure

Students who fail a minor field examination may petition the Graduate Committee for permission to sit for the examination again at any time during the following two quarters, as long as pre-candidacy time limits are not exceeded.  A second failure results automatically in dismissal from the program.

About the Global History Minor Field

The Global History Minor Field is usually completed by taking the three courses listed below:

HIGR 280 ( required ) HIGR 281 ( required ) HIGR 282

Students may use other courses in place of HIGR 282 to fulfill the requirements for the Global History minor field but should consult with Jeremy Presthodt or Uli Strasser prior to taking the class. Further, Jeremy or Uli should be listed as the minor field approver when you submit the Report of the Minor Field Exam. 

Language Requirements

Language requirements by field.

These are baseline requirements. Please consult your faculty advisor about what specific languages would be appropriate for your project.

• Ph.D. candidates in European and Latin American history must demonstrate competency in two foreign languages.
• Ph.D. candidates in East Asian history must demonstrate proficiency in the appropriate language(s), as decided in consultation with the advisor.
• Ph.D. candidates in History of Science and United States history, as well as M.A. candidates in European and Latin American history, must demonstrate competency in one foreign language.
• Ph.D. candidates in Ancient history require two modern foreign languages, as well as the relevant ancient languages.
• Ph.D. candidates in Middle Eastern history must possess a sound foundation in reading Arabic or Turkish (Ottoman Turkish or modern Turkish) as a requirement for admission to the program. Reading competence in two languages in addition to English is required before advancement to candidacy: the regional language Arabic or Turkish above, and a modern European language (other than English) related to the major field of specialization.

Additional languages appropriate to the special field of study as well as language requirements for a candidate in fields other than those already mentioned may be required by the Graduate Committee in consultation with the student's major field adviser.

Completing the Language Requirement

Students may satisfy the foreign language requirement in one of the following ways:

• By completing, with a grade of B- or better in each term, a two-year language sequence from the student's undergraduate institution. Such a sequence must have been completed within two years of the time the request is made to the Graduate Committee for certification of competency.
• By completing, while a graduate student, a two-year, lower-division sequence in the language approved by the Graduate Committee, with a satisfactory (S) grade in each term.
• By completing, while a graduate student, a one-year upper-division sequence in the language approved by the Graduate Committee, with a satisfactory (S) grade in each term.
• By passing a translation examination administered by the department. (This is the only option available for Chinese and Japanese.) A faculty examiner chooses a text that is approximately 3-4 paragraphs, and historical in nature. Students are given two hours (three hours for Latin) to take the exam and are permitted the use of a dictionary. The criteria for evaluation are somewhat subjective but will focus on the grasp of meaning and concepts, rather than word for word translation. Exams will also be offered twice a year, once in the fall quarter and once in the spring quarter. Students may also petition the graduate coordinator to take them at an alternate time. At the beginning of the fall and spring quarters, the graduate coordinator will poll students about their intentions to be tested and will schedule an exam time, usually in the sixth week of classes.

Language Completion Timeline

Students are urged to complete at least one foreign language examination by the end of the first year of study and must do so by the beginning of the third year of study. Failure to meet this requirement is grounds for denial of financial support. No student may take the oral qualifying examination before completing all language requirements.

The  Report of the Language Exam (PDF) is used to   document the completion of a language. Please use the Report of the Language Exam   DocuSign power form under the Departmental Forms section of the webpage to document the completion of the language requirement for all instances except the department administered translation exam.

Committee Constitution and Management

About the committee.

The Qualifying Exam and Dissertation Defense are conducted by a student's Dissertation Committee. The Dissertation Committee is comprised of at least four members. A minimum of two members must be faculty members of the Department of History, and usually, they will be in the student’s major field. The third can be either a faculty member from inside the department but outside the major field or someone from another department. The fourth must be a tenured faculty member in another department. The student’s minor field advisor(s), whether inside the department or in another department, often serve in this “outside” capacity on the committee, although this is not required.

Committee Constitution

Students should consult with their faculty advisor about the composition of the examining committee well before their qualifying exam. In addition, the membership of the committee must be approved by the department chair and the dean of Graduate Studies before the exam. The student must submit the Committee Constitution Request  form below to the Graduate Coordinator at least one month (the earlier the better) prior to their Qualifying Exam. The Graduate Division website has additional information about committees and a Committee Membership Table which may be helpful in determining what role a faculty member may serve on your committee. Please also review the committee requirements in the Graduate Student Handbook. A few notes about that:

• Four of your members must be UC San Diego faculty.
• One member must be a UC San Diego tenured or emeritus faculty who is outside the History Department (e.g. Literature, Communications, Anthropology, Ethnic Studies, etc.).
• a copy of their CV, and;
• a letter of support from your advisor

Constituting Your Committee

The completed committee form must be electronically submitted to the Graduate Division by the Graduate Coordinator no later than two weeks prior to the date scheduled for the qualifying examination/dissertation defense. Please use the Committee Constitution Request form to request that the Graduate Coordinator submit a constitution of your committee to the Graduate Division. This request should be made at least one month prior to your Qualifying Exam:

Requesting to Constitute Your Committee

To constitute your committee please click the button to the right to fill out and route the request form to the Graduate Coordinator via DocuSign. You will need to enter:

Reconstituting Your Committee

The completed committee form must be electronically submitted to the Graduate Division by the Graduate Coordinator no later than four weeks prior to the date scheduled for the dissertation defense. Please use the Committee Reconstitution Request form to request that the Graduate Coordinator submit a reconstitution of your committee to the Graduate Division. Unless someone has asked to be removed from your committee, changes to your committee should be made no earlier than two quarters before you plan to defend and must be made at least one month prior to your Defense.  If someone has asked to be removed, depending on the role they are serving, you may not be able to reconstitute your committee until you find someone to replace them.

Requesting to Reconstitute Your Committee

To reconstitute your committee please click the button to the right to fill out and route the request form to the Graduate Coordinator via DocuSign. You will need to enter:

Committee Management

It is the responsibility of the student, in consultation with their advisor/committee chair, to ensure the policy-appropriate participation of all committee members at their Qualifying Exam and Dissertation Defense. This includes documenting each committee member's participation by obtaining the original signatures of all committee members on the necessary documents for both of those events.

Necessary Documents for the Qualifying Exam

• Report of the Qualifying Exam (routed for signature by the Graduate Coordinator)

Necessary Documents for the Dissertation Defense

• Final Report (routed for signature by the Graduate Coordinator)

Best Practices for Completing the Report of the Qualifying Exam and Final Report via DocuSign:

• Ahead of your exam/defense ask faculty to add [email protected] as a “safe sender” so those emails are less likely to go to junk/spam. Although campus IT has taken steps to identify DocuSign as a safe sender, it is still recommended that individual users do so as well.
• At the end of your Exam/Defense ask your committee members to check their email for the DocuSign email with the link to the form and sign while you're all online together. 
• ask the faculty to check their junk folder, spam quarantine, or other spam folders
• next, ask them to log into their DocuSign account using their @ucsd.edu email address and SSO credentials to access the form/s directly (https://docusign.ucsd.edu) *some people have personal DocuSign accounts so ask them to ensure they are logging into the UCSD DocuSign account
• Get verbal confirmation of who has signed and who has not, then follow up with the Graduate Coordinator to resolve any issues your committee members have with signing the form.
• Once the appropriate form is submitted to the Graduate Division, the appropriate fee will be charged directly to the student’s financial TritonLink account. 

Qualifying Exam/Advancement to Candidacy

Scheduling your qualifying exam .

Please submit the History Exam Card at least one month prior to exam to ensure the department is able to prepare all necessary paperwork and room reservations by your exam. 

Scheduling Your Qualifying Exam

Qualifying Exam Timeline

Students are expected to take their qualifying examination no later than the spring of their third year of study. Students must fulfill all coursework, minor field, and language requirements before taking the qualifying examination. 

Qualifying Exam Administrative Checklist

About the Qualifying Exam

The qualifying examination is an oral test in the student’s major field of study, conducted by the student's Dissertation Committee. The purpose of the major field oral examination is twofold: 1) to evaluate the student’s knowledge of the major research field and 2) to discuss the student’s dissertation project (with the exception of the US field, which holds a separate meeting for this purpose, no later than two months after the exam).

The exam lasts between two and three hours and is structured to give each of the five committee members an opportunity to ask questions of the student, based on the major field reading list. When the prospectus is also under discussion, usually the last half-hour is reserved for this purpose. When the exam is over, the student leaves the room and the committee decides whether the student has passed the exam and advanced to candidacy.

• The major field book list should be drawn up by the student in consultation with the faculty adviser and should be finalized at least thirty days before the date of the exam. Each major field list will reflect the unique interests of the student, while also incorporating core themes of the field. Some field groups have formal core lists that may comprise a part of each student’s total list, while others do not. In all cases, students are expected to organize their major field lists according to the specific themes/nations/issues that have informed their graduate study, since no major field list can be all-inclusive. The number of titles on a major field list should be around 100, with 80–120 titles representing a reasonable range. The date of the examination is determined by consultation between the candidate and the examining committee.
• The discussion of the dissertation project will be framed by a five- to ten-page prospectus written by the student and submitted to the committee with the book list at least four weeks before the exam. The purpose of the discussion is to determine the feasibility of the scope of the project and to offer suggestions about source materials and research strategies.

Qualifying Exam Failure

Should a student fail the examination, the examining committee will clarify the weaknesses in the exam, so that the student can prepare to take it a second time. If a second oral examination is warranted, the department requires that it should be taken no later than one quarter after the first examination. If the student fails the oral examination a second time, his or her graduate studies in the department will be terminated.

Previous Graduate Study

The various requirements noted above apply to students who have done no previous graduate work in history. If a candidate has completed some graduate work before entering UC San Diego, appropriate adjustments in coursework may be approved by a general petition to the graduate committee. Nevertheless, all candidates are required to meet language requirements, pass field examinations, and complete and defend a dissertation prospectus.

MA on the Way

An MA may also be awarded to continuing Ph.D. students (who do not already have an MA in History or closely related fields) upon successfully passing the oral qualifying examination. The MA is not automatically awarded; students must apply in advance to receive the degree, but no additional coursework is required.  

Note:   Students who wish to receive an MA as part of the Ph.D. program must apply for master’s degree candidacy by the end of the third week of the quarter in which they expect to receive the degree. Please follow the instructions on the MA Program page . 

• Report of the Qualifying Exam

Necessary Documents for the MA on the Way

• Application for MA (completely signed by all parties by week three) 
• Final Report for MA 

Dissertation Defense

The Dissertation Defense is the culmination of all of your work within the Ph.D. program. Please read all of the information on the Graduate Division's website about " Preparing to Graduate " and make an appointment to speak with the Graduate Coordinator preferably a year out from when you plan to defend.

Scheduling Your Dissertation Defense Exam 

Scheduling Your Dissertation Defense Exam

Departmental Roles and Responsibilities for the Defense

The Student will:

• Read the " Preparing to Graduate " page of the Graduate Divison's website.
• If you are conducting a hybrid defense, you will need to make an appointment with the department's Computer Resource Specialist to familiarize yourself with the equipment in the room. You will also need to ensure a member of the Student Affairs Team will be onsite to assist you (if need be) on the day of your defense.
• your name as you would like it to appear on your degree
• the title of your dissertation as you would like it to appear on all university records (including the announcement of your defense and the Placement  page of the website)
• Follow up with your committee, the Graduate Division, and the Graduate Advisor about any issues surrounding the completion of your degree.
• Schedule an appointment with the Graduate Division for a preliminary check of your dissertation. The first appointment should be scheduled once you have sent the completed (and formatted) draft of your dissertation to your committee and scheduled your defense.

The Faculty Advisor will:

• Ensure the policy ( here , here , and here ) appropriate participation of all members of the committee at the Dissertation Defense. It is also helpful to remind all committee members to sign the forms by checking their inboxes for the DocuSign request to sign the forms. These sometimes end up in a person's spam folder. UC San Diego faculty can also log into their DocuSign account and find the form under the "Action Required" tab.

The Graduate Coordinator will:

• Fill out the Final Report of the Final Examination and Filing of the Dissertation for the Doctoral Degree form via DocuSign and route the form on the morning of the defense for signature to all committee members, the department chair, the student, and the Graduate Division.
• Follow-up with committee members re: signatures on the final report form
• Send out the announcement of the defense to department faculty and graduate students.

Additional Information and Tasks

Preliminary Dissertation Appointments with the Graduate Division:  Students should schedule their preliminary and final appointments with Graduate Division Academic Affairs Advisers by utilizing the online calendaring system they have in place: https://gradforms.ucsd.edu/calendar/index.php

Committee Management : If you need to make any changes to your doctoral committee please follow the instructions above in the "Committee Management" drawer. 

Embargo Your Dissertation: Talk to your faculty advisor about embargo your dissertation. You may want to embargo your dissertation if you are planning to turn it into a book. The embargo will delay the university's publication of your dissertation and prevent other academics from using your research.

Embargo Form:  https://grad.ucsd.edu/_files/academics/DissertThesisReleaseTemplate.pdf

Documentation of Completion:  Once your committee and department chair sign off on the Final Report via DocuSign (approving your defense and dissertation) you will receive a copy of the form. This signature page is sometimes adequate documentation of the completion of your Ph.D. The rest of the final signatures from the Graduate Division and the Registrar’s Office are not completed until the end of the quarter.

Also, once the Graduate Divison has all the signatures, your dissertation is approved, and all co-author letters are submitted (if required), they also provide a letter from the Dean for temporary confirmation of completion. You should check to find out what is acceptable for proof of completion from the requesting entity. This timeline is also contingent on whether your committee requests any revisions at the defense and how long those revisions delay the submission of your final dissertation after the defense.

• Final Report of the Final Examination and Filing of the Dissertation for the Doctoral Degree (routed for signature by the Graduate Coordinator)

Best Practices for Completing the Final Report via DocuSign:

• At the end of your Defense ask your committee members to check their email for the DocuSign email with the link to the form and sign while you're all online together. 

Paying Associated Fees:  For students who will need to pay fees (advancement to candidacy, thesis submission fee, filing fee, re-admit fee), they will be charged the appropriate fees on their student financial TritonLink account once the form is received by the Graduate Division. There is no need for students to go to the cashier’s office. Unlike tuition and fees, there is no system set up that will allow the department to pay these fees on the student's behalf with department funds. 

Email and Mailing List: Please read over this information for managing your ucsd.edu email account. Also, please let the Graduate Coordinator if you would like to be added to the graduate Program Alumni Mailing which is used to contact you about departmental alumni events, and to forward announcements about job openings and funding opportunities.

Returning to Defend

Students In-Candidacy who do not defend within their Support Time Limit and withdraw or are administratively withdrawn from the program may return and register for one day to defend their dissertation. Below is a chart of what fees are required, based on when the student was  last enrolled. The three fees total around $300 (as of 1/2022).

Aside from the fees, all other administrative steps are the same. Students returning to defend should follow the steps noted above under the Departmental Roles and Responsibilities for the Defense,  section. Depending on how long ago the student left the program, it may be necessary to reconstitute their Dissertation Committee. The student should contact their Dissertation Committee Chair and the Graduate Coordinator to assist with this process.

Fees for Dissertation Defense

Graduate Exam Modality Policy

The preferred modality for conducting graduate examinations (doctoral qualifying examination and final dissertation/thesis defense) is to have the student and all committee members physically present. It is expected that there will be synchronous participation by all committee members in the scheduled exam and that at least half of the committee, including the Chair (or one co-chair), will participate in person. However, the department recognizes that a remote or hybrid graduate examination may be in the best interest of the student. There must be sufficient expertise among present members to examine the student. If a committee member must be absent for the scheduled exam, it is permissible for one absent committee member to examine the candidate on a separate date. Requests for exceptions to this policy may be submitted by the student and will be reviewed by the Director of Graduate Studies and Department Chair.

Request for Exception

To request an exception to the department's graduate exam modality policy please click the button to the right to fill out and route for signature the Request for Exam Modality Exception form via DocuSign. You will need to enter:

• the name and email of your faculty advisor/committee chair
• the names of all of your committee members and their preferred participation modality
• a justification/argument for how this configuration is in the best interest of the student

For reference:  Request for Exam Modality Exception (PDF)

Evaluation of Academic Work

The department expects all graduate students to do "A" level work. Grades below "B-" are considered evidence of unsatisfactory progress; a "C+" or any lower letter grade is recorded on the transcript, but is regarded as the equivalent of a failure. Required field courses must be taken for a letter grade. Students are strongly encouraged to take their entire first-year program for letter grades. These grades assist the department in evaluating the student's academic progress and in determining future financial support. Post-first-year students may take elective courses for satisfactory/unsatisfactory evaluation.

Incompletes Grades of "I" (Incomplete) must be changed to a letter grade by week 10 of the quarter following the quarter in which the course was taken. The grade will be recorded as a failure if the work has not been completed by then. Faculty do not have the authority to grant extensions of incompletes. A request for an extension of an incomplete must be made to the Graduate Division via the Graduate Program Coordinator in week 8 or 9 and these types of requests should only be made under exceptional circumstances.

Repeating Courses Once an "F" or "U" has been assigned and uncontested for a year, the grade is permanent. Students may repeat courses where they have received an "F" or "U" to prevent them from being academically disqualified from the program, however, the grade will remain on their transcript. To repeat a course, please register for the course you would like to repeat, and send that information to the Department's Graduate Advising Staff so that they can submit the request to repeat the course.

Academic Disqualification

A graduate student is subject to disqualification if the cumulative GPA in upper-division and graduate course work taken as a graduate student is less than 3.0, or if more than a total of eight units of F and/or U grades has been accumulated .

Spring Evaluation

Each spring in the years before the student has advanced to candidacy, faculty members from the field group will meet with each student individually to discuss the student's progress. In addition, the faculty adviser will submit a written evaluation for the student's file. Students are entitled to include a response in their permanent records. Once they are advanced to candidacy, graduate students continue to receive annual written evaluations of their progress from their respective faculty dissertation advisers. These evaluations are to be read and signed by the student, the adviser, at least three of the faculty members on the student's dissertation committee, and the department chair.

Time Limits

There are four time limits listed on your student record, but only three of the time limits affect students:

• Pre-Candidacy Time Limit (PCTL) -The amount of time you may be registered/enrolled in the Ph.D. program before advancing to candidacy.
• Support Time Limit (SUTL)- The amount of time you are eligible to receive funding support (work as a Teaching Assistant or Associate-In, grants, fellowships, etc.) from the university.
• Total Registered Time Limit (TRTL)- The amount of time you may be registered/enrolled in the graduate program.

The duration of the Ph.D. program is five to eight years. University and departmental regulations stipulate that the maximum tenure of graduate study at UCSD or Total Registered Time Limit (TRTL) is eight years; while seven years is the limit for receiving any type of university financial support or a student's Support Time Limit (SUTL). For the Department of History, the "normative" time to degree is 7 years. Students are expected to pass their qualifying exam and advance to candidacy in year three, but no later than year four which is the university's Pre-candidacy time limit (PCTL). Students are also limited to 18 quarters of appointments as either Teaching Assistants or Associate-ins (summer appointments don't count). Please read about how your Support Time Limit and 18-quarter employment limit affect your financial support and track your employment quarters:  https://history.ucsd.edu/graduate/funding.html#How-do-the-Support-Time-Limit-a

To learn more about time limits please visit the Graduate Division website.

Time Limits:  https://grad.ucsd.edu/academics/progress-to-degree/time-to-doctorate-policy.html

You can check your time limit by logging into the Graduate Student Portal.

Graduate Student Portal:  https://gradforms.ucsd.edu/portal/student/

Scholarly Articles

Opportunities for teaching, teaching assistantships.

In addition to providing funding opportunities, Teaching Assistantships are an integral part of the graduate program at UCSD, providing training and experience in undergraduate teaching. All students are encouraged to spend at least one year as a Teaching Assistant.

The training of teaching assistants is the responsibility of the program in which the teaching is done. For teaching assistants employed within the History Department, an orientation seminar will be offered at the beginning of the fall quarter. The seminar will be organized by the faculty teaching coordinator, in collaboration with a senior TA, both of whom serve as advisers for first-time Teaching Assistants throughout the year. In addition, departmental teaching assistants attend one four-hour training session given by the Center for Teaching Development prior to the beginning of instruction in the Fall Quarter.

For teaching assistants employed by the college programs or in the Linguistics Department, training sessions are organized by these programs to orient students in specific course content and methodologies. These seminars are often scheduled during the week prior to the beginning of instruction in the Fall Quarter. Training continues throughout the academic year in weekly staff meetings.

Teaching assistants both inside and outside the department are evaluated by the course instructor. The instructor visits a teaching assistant's section at least once each quarter and reviews a representative sample of papers and exams for fairness and consistency of grading. The instructor prepares a written evaluation of the teaching assistant at the end of the quarter, and the teaching assistant acknowledges the instructor's comments by signing the evaluation. The TA also has the opportunity to include a written response in their file.

Associate-In

There are some opportunities for advanced graduate students in the final year of their program to serve as the primary instructor ("Assoc-In") for an upper-division course in the history department. First, a graduate student may be asked to teach an existing course to replace a faculty member on leave. Second, a graduate student may apply to teach a course of their own design during one of the summer sessions.

Part-time Study

Students who enroll in fewer than twelve graduate or upper-division units per quarter are considered part-time students and are not eligible for support funding (eg. stipends, tuition and fee remission, tuition and fee scholarships, Academic Student Employment, etc.).

Approval for individual students to enroll on a part-time basis may be given for reasons of employment, family responsibilities, or health. Individuals who are interested in part-time study and meet the department's qualifications should speak with the Graduate Coordinator.

Part-time students must satisfy the same admission requirements as full-time students and are eligible, at the discretion of the department, for 25 percent time teaching or research assistantships (but not tuition and fee remission). Students who are approved by the Dean of Graduate Studies for enrollment in a program of half-time study or less (a maximum of six units) may be eligible for a reduction of fees. All other students pay the same fees as full-time students.

Job Placement

Field specific curriculum.

Students in ancient history will be expected to demonstrate a broad mastery of the entire field, with special concentration as follows:

Major Fields

• The history of Israel in the biblical period
• The history of the Jewish people in antiquity
• The history of Classical Greece
• The history of the Roman Empire (including late antiquity)

First Minor

• One of the fields listed above not chosen as the major field
• Greek and Roman history
• The Middle East before Islam (western Asia and northeastern Africa from the sixth century B.C.E. to the seventh century C.E.)

Second Minor

• A field of history outside of ancient history
• A related discipline, offered through another department

All students will be expected to demonstrate a reading knowledge of two modern foreign languages, usually French and German. This requirement may be satisfied by any of the means recognized by the department.

All students will be expected to demonstrate a reading knowledge of at least one and usually two of the three following ancient languages: Greek, Hebrew, and Latin. The languages will be chosen as appropriate to the student’s particular interests and the requirement will be satisfied by departmental examination.

The second and sometimes third language not elected under (2) may be required if necessary for the student’s research. Additional languages, such as Akkadian, Aramaic, Egyptian, Ugaritic, Phoenician, Coptic, Syriac, and middle and modern Hebrew, may be required as necessary for the student’s research. The required level of competence will be set as appropriate to the student's needs and the requirement will be satisfied by departmental examination.

Research Seminars

HIGR 260A-B. Research Seminar in Ancient History

HIGR 223A-B. Research Seminar in Medieval History

Historiographic Scholarship

HIGR 254. Historical Scholarship in Ancient History

HIGR 258: Historical Scholarship in Medieval History

Students in East Asian history will be expected to demonstrate a broad competence in the entire field, with special concentration as follows:

• The history of modern China
• The history of modern Japan
• The history of modern Korea

First Minor Field

A coherent “teaching field,” such as

• The history of same country as the major field, but a different time period
• The history of different region within East Asia, including transnational studies

Second Minor Field

A “theoretical, comparative, or transnational field,” such as

• The history of a place outside of East Asia
• A discipline outside of history

Language Requirements:

The student must demonstrate:

1) native or near-native fluency in English speaking and writing;

2) proficient reading and speaking knowledge of the main language(s) appropriate to the major field, including classical language where needed; and

3) when appropriate for a proposed research project, working knowledge of another language, decided upon in consultation with the advisor.  

HIGR 215A-B: Research Seminar in Modern Chinese History

HIGR 216A-B: Research Seminar in Modern Japanese History

HIGR 218A-B: Research Seminar in Pre-Modern Chinese History

HIGR 219A-B: Research Seminar in Korean History

HIGR 210: Historical Scholarship on Modern Chinese History (3 qtrs.)

HIGR 211: Historical Scholarship on Modern Japanese History (2 qtrs.)

HIGR 212: Historical Scholarship on Modern East Asian History

HIGR 213: Sources on Modern Chinese History

HIGR 214: Historical Scholarship on Modern Korean History

HIGR 217A-B-C: Historical Scholarship in Pre-Modern Chinese History (3 qtrs.)

The graduate program in European history aims to achieve a dual objective: to develop a broad mastery of the major themes and scholarship in the field, as well as to encourage a special focus of research within a single nation or region in either the modern or early modern era.

Within the major field, national specialization is offered in modern Germany, Spain, Russia and Greece, and in early modern Italy and Germany. Regional specialization is offered in central/eastern Europe and in the Mediterranean.

• Modern Europe
• Early modern Europe

The first minor field should be selected from within the parameters of European history or in world/global history, but in a chronological period outside that of the major field.

• Medieval Europe
• A second national history
• World/global history

The second minor field is designed either to develop a non-European teaching expertise or to pursue broader theoretical reading related to the research interests of the student or in a chronological period outside that of the major field.

• A geographical area outside Europe
• History of science
• A transnational thematic or theoretical concentration, such as gender history, citizenship, nationalism, etc.
• A thematic or theoretical concentration rooted in another discipline, such as anthropology, sociology, art history, ethnic studies, or literature.
• Early modern Europe (only if the world/global history was taken as the first minor field)

All European PhD students must show reading proficiency in two European languages other than English.

HIGR 230A-B: Research Seminar in European History

HIGR 223A-B: Research Seminar in Medieval History

HIGR 220: Historical Scholarship on European History, 1500-1750

HIGR 221: Historical Scholarship on European History, 1715-1850

HIGR 222: Historical Scholarship on European History, since 1850

HIGR 225: Readings in Modern Russian History

Doctoral candidates in Latin American history are expected to gain a broad chronological and geographical mastery of the field as a whole. The oral examination in the major field, while concentrating on the student’s special area of interest, will be a comprehensive examination covering the whole field of Latin American history.

• The national period of Latin America, with a specialty in the Andean Republics, Brazil, the Caribbean, Mexico, or the Southern Cone countries
• Colonial Latin America, with an emphasis on one major region

The student should select either the national period or the colonial period as a chronological supplement to the major.

• The history of another geographic area outside Latin America and the Caribbean
• An area of discipline, offered through another department, related to the student’s dissertation or preparation for university teaching

Competency in two languages in addition to English before advancement to candidacy is required. Normally the first of these will be Spanish. The second may be Portuguese or another European or non-European language, including an indigenous language of the Americas.

HIGR 247A-B: Readings and Seminar on Colonial Latin America

HIGR 248A-B: Readings and Seminar on Latin America, National Period

HILA 267: Scholarship on Latin American History in the Colonial Period

HILA 268:  Scholarship on Latin American History in the Nineteenth Century

HILA 269:  Scholarship on Latin American History in the Twentieth Century

The objective of the doctoral program in Middle Eastern history is to achieve broad expertise in the modern history of the Middle East and to develop a special focus on the history of the late Ottoman Empire or its successor states.

• Late Ottoman history (approximately 1780 to 1920)
• Colonial and national period of the post-Ottoman Middle East with a specialty in the Arab East, Turkey, Egypt, etc.

Minor Fields

Any two of the following:

• The field of Middle Eastern history not chosen as a major field (see above)
• The modern history of a geographic area outside of the Middle East (ordinarily in European history)
• A related geographical or topical field (e.g., medieval Middle East, Iran, gender studies) offered through another department

Students must possess a sound foundation in reading Arabic or Turkish (Ottoman Turkish or modern Turkish) as a requirement for admission to the program. Reading competence in two languages in addition to English is required before advancement to candidacy: the regional language Arabic or Turkish (above), and a modern European language (other than English) related to the major field of specialization.

HIGR 275A-B: Research Seminar in Middle Eastern History

HIGR 274A: Historical Scholarship on the Early Modern Middle East

HIGR 274B: Historical Scholarship on Modern Middle East, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

HIGR 274C: Historical Scholarship on Modern Middle East, Colonial, National, and Post-colonial Eras

United States History

One of the following topical fields:

• African-American history
• Asian-American history
• Atlantic history
• history of the borderlands and Southwest
• Chicano history
• economic history
• legal and constitutional history
• political history
• social and cultural history
• history of the South
• history of the West
• history of women, gender, and sexuality,
• one designed in consultation with the adviser
• A geographic area outside the United States in either the premodern or modern period
• A related discipline offered through another department

Competency in one language in addition to English before advancement to candidacy is required.

HIGR 267A-B: Research Seminar in United States History

HIGR 265A-B-C: Historical Scholarship on American History

Specialization in History of Science

• Science in early modern Europe
• Science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
• Science in the twentieth century
• Another field of comparable breadth, defined in consultation with the major field adviser

First and Second Minor Fields

• Any two of the following may be selected, in consultation with the major field adviser
• Science Studies (mandatory for students in the Science Studies program).
• Any of the other fields offered by the department, provided that it offers general historical understanding of the same period as the major field.
• A field of history of science not chosen as the major field.
• A second field of history, provided that it concentrates on a period or region other than that chosen for the first minor field.
• A related discipline, offered through another department.  ( This field may be in the physical or life sciences.)

Competency in one or two languages in addition to English before advancement to candidacy is required. The requirement will vary depending on chosen major field.

HIGR 239: Seminar in Science Studies

HIGR 238: Introduction to Science Studies

HIGR 241: Advanced Approaches to Science Studies

HIGR 240: Colloquium in Science Studies

HIGR 243: Historical Scholarship in Technology

Specialization in Critical Gender Studies (CGS)

UCSD's Critical Gender Studies program began as Women's Studies in the 1970s, alongside both an active non-academic women's rights movement and the nascent institutionalization of women's studies as an academic presence. The program was initiated with participation from students and faculty across the humanities and social sciences, including many of the same departments that continue to be involved. From the beginning, it understood itself as an interdisciplinary countercurrent, drawing from these disciplines and simultaneously offering a critique of accepted ideas and beliefs within them.

In the late 90s, the program's faculty introduced curricular revisions and the name change to Critical Gender Studies. With this, UCSD became one of the first institutions to formally acknowledge and embrace the importance of sexuality and racial formation for the interdisciplinary study of gender. Always forward-thinking and rigorously interdisciplinary, the program has proven immensely useful and enriching for the undergraduate students who have partaken in it for the last several decades. Given the rich history and roots of this program, we are pleased to announce that such benefits now extend to graduate students through the CGS graduate specialization.

UCSD has long been a vibrant site for the study of gender and sexuality, with many graduate students and faculty already engaged in gender-related projects. These students and faculty have collaboratively organized toward recognition of this focus in their research. The specialization has been put in place to respond to such demands, providing a central program through which graduate students may develop their work among peers who take up similar questions. The program encourages applications from all graduate students (who have been admitted to the participating departments) whose work takes up questions of gender. Through the contributions of CGS faculty who specialize in women of color feminism(s) and queer of color critique, the program helps to develop and foster an understanding of gender as necessarily linked to race, sexuality and other social formations.

https://cgs.ucsd.edu/

Departmental forms, field curriculum status sheets, about the status sheet.

The  Status Sheet was originally developed for use by staff as an administrative tool. It tracks the elements of the PhD requirements that staff need to check in order to ensure you are administratively prepared for the Qualifying Exam and to receive an MA on the Way (if you are eligible). This should be filled out to the best of your ability prior to meeting with the Graduate Coordinator about preparing the paperwork for your Qualifying exam or MA on the Way.

Status Sheets 

All status sheets are word docs. Please download the form, click on each line to fill out the form, and save the form using the following naming convention: [FamilyName]_[First Initial]-Status Sheet [YEAR-MO-DA], ex. Triton_K-Status Sheet 2024-09-23 . Further, please list the dates Minors or Language Exams were passed. Also, please indicate the quarter all courses listed on the status sheet were taken (this is especially important for 298s), ex.  HIGR 200 (FA20).   Finally, if you plan to use a 298 to fulfill the course requirement for either the Research Seminar or Historiography, you need to fill out a general petition to have that substitution approved and documented.

• Ancient (.doc)
• East Asia (.doc)
• Europe (.doc)
• Latin America (.doc)
• Middle East (.doc)
• United States (.doc)
• Specialization in the History of Science (.doc)
• Specialization in Critical Gender Studies

Report of the Minor Field Exam

• the name and email of the faculty member approving your minor field

Report of the Language Exam

Documenting completion of a language.

Please use this form only to document the fulfillment of a language by means other than the departmental Language Exam (e.g. course work, petition, etc). Please click the button to the right to fill out and route for signature the Report of the Language Exam via DocuSign. You will need to enter:

• the name and email of your faculty advisor 
• the name and email of the Graduate Coordinator

You may also need to attach a PDF of either an approved departmental petition, your transcripts, or other documentation.

Department General Petition

Please use this form to petition alterations to curriculum as stated in the university catalog . Please click the button to the right to fill out and route for signature the Departmental General Petition via DocuSign. You will need to enter:

• the name and email of the Graduate Coordinator (or Graduate Program Assistant in Grad. Coords. absence)
• the name and email of your faculty advisor

You may also need to attach a PDF your transcripts, or other documentation.

Wording for Common Petitions

East Asian History Third Minor Field Request: I would like to waive the third minor field requirement. Reason: East Asian faculty have agreed that a third minor field is not necessary for mastery—which is in line with the requirements of all other field groups in the department.

Department Letterhead Request

• Personal statement or cover letter for a job application
• Personal statement or cover letter for a fellowship application or other type of financial support application
• Personal statement of cover letter for a conference presentation application
• It may only be used during the time in which individuals are active PhD students in the department.
• Students must request and receive written permission (from the Graduate Coordinator) to use the letterhead for any purpose not listed above.
• All uses of the letterhead should make clear that the document is originating from the individual student (sender details begin with student’s name and student’s name is added as the signature at the end of the document).
• No student may use the letterhead to express the opinions of the History Department, other students, faculty, or any other entities beyond themselves.

If you have any questions about the proper uses of the History Department letterhead, ask the Graduate Coordinator before using it. Once you complete the application below and receive a copy of the letterhead, it is your responsibility to follow all policies and standards.

University of South Florida

Department of History

College of Arts and Sciences

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Ph.d. in history.

The Department of History at the University of South Florida offers Ph.D. applicants an enriching program of study, coursework, and directed research. A Ph.D. degree in History can prepare students for a variety of careers in the public and private sectors where research, critical thinking, and writing skills are especially important.

The Ph.D. in History at USF offers three Concentrations (major fields). Students interested in one of these fields should make sure that there is at least one faculty member within the department that would be willing to supervise them in a given major field: 

• History of the Americas (including public history, Florida history, Latin-American history, Transatlantic history, LGBTQ+ history, gender and sexuality history, US and the world, immigration history, indigenous/Native American history, US religious history, and environmental history);
• World History to 1500 (including digital and classical archaeology, the ancient Mediterranean, the medieval Mediterranean, medieval British Isles, gender and sexuality history, and the Italian Renaissance);
• World History since 1500 (including comparative empires, Transatlantic history, gender and sexuality history, Irish history, and the Cold War).

These concentrations, along with minor fields in thematic areas such as public history, the digital humanities, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, and material culture, correspond with the expertise of our faculty, who aim to provide rigorous training in historical analysis and research to our students.

Graduate Coordinator: Dr. Matt King

Graduate Academic Program Specialist: Ruth Borrero

Graduate Catalog

Prospective and current students should refer to the USF Graduate Catalog of the year they entered the program (or the current year for prospective students) for information on admissions requirements, degree requirements, and university policies related to graduate study.

For admissions requirements specific to the USF History Department, please see our Admissions page  as well as the USF History Ph.D. Catalog page .

For information on the requirements for each specific History concentration, please refer to the USF History Ph.D. Catalog .

program manuals 

Information about policies and procedures for the PhD program is contained within the History Department PhD Program Manual .

University and department policies and procedures related to diversity, inclusion, sexual harassment, and disability accommodations are included in the History Department Diversity Manual .

Department of History

Ph.D. in History of Science

Siobhan Barco and Haris Durrani were awarded fellowships. Joseph Bishop won an essay prize. Bennett Nagtegaal published an article, and Joseph Puchner presented a paper.…

The prize, for her book, "The Arts of the Microbial World: Fermentation Science in Twentieth-Century Japan," is awarded to outstanding publications in the field of Asian…

The Program in History of Science at Princeton University trains students to analyze science, medicine, and technology in historical and cultural context. We are a community of scholars including roughly a dozen core and affiliated faculty members and about twenty graduate students, in addition to undergraduate concentrators and visiting fellows.

Undergraduate

Find out how to  Concentrate in HOS  and see what courses are currently offered.

Learn more about our  graduate  and graduate certificate programs in History of Science, and find current graduate course offerings.

Stay connected and learn about  alumni resources , including the History Department’s Dossier Service.

Meet Our Faculty

Browse profiles of the Executive Committee and Associated Faculty in History of Science.

Illustration from Historia Stirpium . Source:  Wellcome Collection .

Photo credit: " L0015096EB " by  Wellcome Library, London is licensed under CC BY 4.0 . Image has been cropped.