The Department of History invites students to reimagine the traditional ways we carve up geographical space by examining not just the histories of nations but also those of regions, trade, and cultural exchange. History teaches a way of thinking, a way of questioning, and a way of wondering about the world. After all, the past is never really fixed.
History undergraduates gain insight into diverse beliefs, social arrangements, and technologies that have shaped human experience and given it meaning. We ask students to do much more than memorize facts; we ask them to solve intellectual puzzles, to evaluate conflicting evidence, and to assess different scholarly interpretations of the past.
Our distinguished faculty has organized its strengths into 15 different fields of study and 7 cross-field research clusters. These are: Gender and Sexualities; Empires and Borderlands; Commerce, Commodities and Material Cultures; Religion, Cultures and Society; Science, Technology and Society; Pre-Modern Cultures and Communities; and Public History and Theory.
“Studying history, you get to cross over into psychology. You get to cross cross over into sociology. You get to read all these great literary works. It’s not limited, and you get to explore so many other things that you really wouldn’t be able to in a lot of other majors.”
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