Interdepartmental Strengths, Graduate, History Department, Northwestern University

Graduate students in history at Northwestern draw on clusters of faculty strength that extend well beyond the limits of the history department. The examples that follow are indicative rather than exhaustive.

African Studies

In addition to specialists in the history department, Northwestern enjoys one of the greatest concentrations of strength in African studies on this continent. Among these Africanists are Sandra Richards (African American Studies and Theater); Richard Lepine (African and Asian languages - Swahili); Caroline Beldsoe, Karen Tranberg Hansen, and Robert Launay (Anthropology); Will Reno (Political Science); Paul Berliner (Music), and Margaret Drewal (Performance Studies). The Program of African Studies and several institutes housed within it offer additional opportunities to graduate students in African Studies. These include the Institute of Advanced Study and Research in the African Humanities and the Program on International Cooperation in Africa, which focuses on border regions. For information about these programs, write:

Program of African Studies
Northwestern University
620 Library Place
Evanston, Illinois 60208-4110.

African Diaspora and African American History

Northwestern is emerging as a leading center for graduate study of the African Diaspora and African American history. The History Department, African American Studies, and African Studies have together assembled an outstanding roster of distinguished senior scholars and innovative young scholars working on all aspects of the black diaspora. Building on Northwestern's historic standing as the premier African history program in the United States thanks to our pioneering and unrivaled Herskovits Library of African Studies, we have in recent years hired new faculty at all levels in African American history, African history, Afro-Caribbean history and Latin American history. They work in varied subfields: history of pre-colonial Africa, history of slavery, women's history, black social and political history, history of religion, empire and anti-colonialism, comparative race and ethnicity, cultural history, and other diasporas. In 2004-05, Northwestern will be inaugurating a new Center for African American History that will support faculty and graduate student research and sponsor lectures, symposia, and other events.

In addition, our students can take advantage of outstanding faculty in the related disciplines of Anthropology, English, Law, Political Science, Religion, Performance Studies, Sociology, and Theater who have joint appointments with African American Studies and African Studies. Northwestern students have easy access to the vast resources of the Chicago area for research in the African Diaspora and African American history: among them the Chicago Historical Society, the DuSable Museum, the Harsch Collection, and the Newberry Library (see below for links). Northwestern's Institute for Policy Research also sponsors research, lectures, and seminars on related public policy matters.

Among the History and African American Studies faculty who work in these areas are: Josef Barton, Henry Binford, Martha Biondi, T.H. Breen, Sherwin Bryant, Brodwyn Fischer, Jonathon Glassman, Darlene Clark Hine, John Hunwick, Tessie Liu, Nancy MacLean, Dylan Penningroth, Frank Safford, David Schoenbrun, Butch Ware, and Ji-Yeon Yuh.

See also, at Northwestern:

African American Studies: http://www.afam.northwestern.edu

Center for African American History: http://www.wcas.northwestern.edu/caah/

Institute for Policy Research: http://www.northwestern.edu/ipr/

Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies: http://www.library.northwestern.edu/africana/index.html

Program of African Studies: http://www.northwestern.edu/african-studies/

In Chicago:

The Chicago Historical Society: http://www.chicagohs.org/

The DuSable Museum of African American History: http://www.dusablemuseum.org/

The Newberry Library: http://www.newberry.org/

The Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and Literature:
http://www.chipublib.org/002branches/woodson/wnharsh.html

Economic History

Members of the history department whose scholarly activity includes research in economic history and who help provide comparative perspectives for each other's students are Henry Binford, Peter Hayes, Laura Hein and Frank Safford. In addition, one of America's most prominent economic historians, Joel Mokyr, who specializes in the economic and technological development of modern Europe, holds a joint appointment in the history and economics departments. The economics department itself includes Joseph Ferrie, a specialist in the history of immigration. Sociologists Bruce G. Carruthers and Carol A. Heimer, political scientists Ben Ross Schneider, Kathleen A. Thelan, and Michael J. Wallerstein provide other valuable contexts. The economics department sponsors a lively program of seminars and guest speakers in economic history and meets jointly several times each year with economic historians from the Chicago area to hear distinguished outside speakers.

Gender, Sexuality and Women's History

Students interested in the history of gender and sexuality have an exceptionally strong cluster of faculty with whom to work at Northwestern. The core group includes, in European history, Tessie Liu and Alexandra Owen, and in U.S. history, Nancy MacLean and Michael Sherry. Among the other History faculty who have taught or published in this area are Peter Carroll, Laura Hein, Melissa Macauley, Sarah Maza, Carl Petry, and Ji-Yeon Yuh. Students who choose this area as a specialization field or minor field can avail themselves of regularly offered theory courses along with their field specific classes, and of resources beyond the department, including the graduate certification in Gender Studies program. Just a few of the many non-History Northwestern faculty members whose work explores these issues are Nicola Beisel (Sociology); Micaela di Leonardo (Anthropology); Hollis Clayson (Art History); Dwight Conquergood (Performance Studies); Christine Froula (English); Bonnie Honig (Political Science); Laura Kipnis (Radio/TV/Film); Rae Moses (Linguistics); Ann Orloff (Sociology); Julia Stern (English); Mimi White (Radio/TV/Film).

History of Science and Technology

Graduate students interested in the history of science, technology, or medicine can work in the history department with Ken Alder, Francesca Bordogna, and Alexandra Owen, as well as with other faculty members in related areas, such as Joel Mokyr and T. William Heyck. The program in Science and Human Culture offers annual fellowships to graduate students interested in this field, and also brings in annual postdoctoral fellows and sponsors a weekly faculty-student seminar with speakers of international reputation. Prominent faculty members in other departments who participate in this program include Helmut Muller-Sievers (a Germanist interested in the relationship of science and literature). The emphasis in the program is on teaching students how to use the history of science, technology, and medicine to answer broader historical questions.

Medieval and Early Modern Culture

Northwestern has one of the most eminent groups of scholars working in medieval and early modern European thought, culture, and art in North America. One of the special strengths of faculty research is in the history of religion, including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, but they also have pursued important work in many aspects of intellectual, cultural, and social history. Within the history department, students may work with the medievalists Dyan Elliott, Richard Kieckhefer, Jacob Lassner, Robert Lerner, John Hunwick, and Carl Petry. For the Renaissance and Early Modern period graduate students study with Sarah Maza, William Monter, and Edward Muir. Prominent scholars in other departments include the Art Historians Lyle Massey and Claudia Swan; English literary scholars Albert Cirillo, Martin Mueller, Barbara Newman, Regina Schwartz, and Wendy Wall; Romance language literary scholars Dario Fernandez-Morera, William Paden, and Davide Stimilli. Several interdepartmental study groups meet on a regular basis, both independently and under the auspices of the Alice Berline Kaplan Center for the Humanities. For information on the Graduate School's cluster in medieval studies, please visit:

http://www.tgs.northwestern.edu/academics/interdisciplinary/medievalstudies/

Modern Europe

The department's Modern Europeanists span a wide range of area and methodologies, clustering around two main specialties, economic/business history and intellectual/cultural history. Peter Hayes in German history and Joel Mokyr in Economic history are interested in, respectively, the history of business institutions and the history of technology, while Benjamin Frommer works on legal institutions. Tessie Liu has applied innovative methods drawn from women's and gender history to labor history in Modern France and Ken Alder, a historian of science, has published extensively on the history of technology in Revolutionary France. The department's Modern European historians with an interest in intellectual history include T.W. Heyck and Alexandra Owen in Modern British history. Modern Europeanists interested in social and cultural history include John Bushnell for twentieth-century Russia, Alex Owen for gender in Modern Britain, Tessie Liu for gender and race in nineteenth-century France, and Benjamin Frommer for East-Central Europe. The department's economic and business historians are actively involved with Northwestern's Center for International and Comparative Studies, while many of our intellectual and cultural historians have held fellowships in the interdisciplinary Alice Berline Kaplan Center for the Humanities.