Northwestern's Ph.D. program in history owes its national reputation to an outstanding faculty of scholar-teachers, a flexible and well articulated course of study, and a record of recruiting, training, and placing diverse and talented graduate students.
The renown of the faculty is perhaps best indicated by the frequent award of research fellowships and book prizes to its members. A third of the professors in the department have won prestigious Guggenheim fellowships, and all have received grants from other highly competitive foundations and programs. At least 15 members of the current full time faculty have won national awards for their monographs. Excellence in teaching is another feature of the department: nine members have won distinguished teacher awards at the University in the last few years.
Northwestern's program is distinguished from many others by its relatively small size. Only 15 to 20 students enter each year; most choose one of three regional concentrations for the Ph.D.: African history, American history, and European history. Students can also choose to concentrate in Latin American or East Asian History.
A small, highly selective program has a number of advantages. It allows close faculty student interaction and small seminars. It permits exacting criticism of sources, research procedures, and writing skills. It encourages the exchange of ideas among students working in different geographical areas, an exchange that often inspires path breaking scholarship. It fosters flexibility in designing courses of study. For example, students with serious interests in more than one geographical area may develop an individually tailored program in comparative history; very few history departments provide such an option. Finally, it enables faculty to concentrate their placement efforts on a relatively small number of students.
The program of study for the Ph.D. seeks to prepare students for distinguished careers as teachers and scholars. It is therefore designed to help students achieve a comprehensive grasp of particular historical fields and processes; develop critical skills in respect to sources, texts, genres, theory, and methods of inquiry; and carry out original research that makes a significant contribution to historical study.
Students learn more than just fields within history; they become acquainted with major trends in the discipline as a whole and with the possible relevance to historical scholarship of both classical social theory and work currently being done in other social scientific and humanistic disciplines. The department encourages students to think about history in conceptually sophisticated ways and to acquire a frame of reference for their research based on grounding in geographical and crossdisciplinary field outside of their specializations. Thus, in addition to courses within each field of specialization, the department's offerings include seminars that provide a common experience of history as an open ended discipline with a wide range of conceptual and methodological possibilities.
The character and small size of the graduate history program provide optimal support to graduates seeking employment in today's job market. The department is particularly proud of the teaching experience and mentoring offered to graduate students, which equip them to compete for faculty appointments with a record of demonstrated capacity in the classroom. Indeed, because of the department's long standing dedication to excellence in both teaching and scholarship, Graduates of Northwestern's Ph.D. program currently occupy professorships in history at major colleges and universities throughout the country.
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