History Doctoral Programs in the United States and Canada

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Johns Hopkins Univ

Department Web Site

Areas of Specialization:

U.S., Europe, Latin America, Africa, East Asia

Program Description

The Johns Hopkins Department of History welcomes graduate students as members of a diverse and congenial community of scholars. The Department takes seriously the idea that graduate students are junior colleagues with much to contribute. The program is designed for students who wish to proceed directly to the PhD degree and aims to train students for careers as research scholars and university teachers. Our program assists students in becoming innovative scholars but also prepares them to be effective teachers and to participate in a challenging professional world.
The Hopkins history department is the oldest PhD program in history in the United States and the recipients of our degrees hold distinguished positions in university and colleges in this country and abroad. The Department continues to pioneer new areas of research. The Department's particular areas of strength include history of the United States, Europe from medieval times through the twentieth century, Latin America, Africa, Modern Russia, and East Asian history. Most faculty focus on social, economic, intellectual, and cultural history. In addition to the Department's long distinguished concentration in the Atlantic world, it hosts clusters of faculty with common interests in transnational, comparative, imperial and gender/women's history. We endeavor to recruit students with a similarly varied set of interests and orientations.
The combination of flexibility, independence, scholarly collegiality, and intensity of intellectual exchange offered by the Hopkins program gives it a distinctive character. The weekly departmental Seminar, attended by the entire faculty and graduate students, is the center of intellectual life in the Department. The Seminar--as well as specialized seminars in European history, U.S. history, and comparative world history--brings together students, faculty, and invited scholars from outside the University to discuss their research work. They create a lively intellectual community in which graduate students quickly become contributing members. In addition to these public seminars, students have the opportunity to enroll in graduate courses and research seminars, run by individual faculty.
The teaching of graduate students plays a central role in the history department. The program is organized around seminars and departmental fields. With study and guidance from their advisors, students are able to design their own program. They select four fields (a major field and three minor fields) and arrange with individual professors for a study program leading to comprehensive examinations at the end of the second year. Students are allowed to go outside the department to complete a minor field in an allied discipline.
The Hopkins history program places a high premium on careful mentoring of students by individual faculty. The decision to nominate any student for admission is made only by one or more faculty members who will become that student's sponsor or sponsors. Applicants should indicate the proposed field of specialization and their interest in working with a cluster of faculty at a time of application. Students, may, of course, later change their major advisor, with the concurrence of another member of the Department.
The main criteria for admissions are outstanding intellectual promise and an evident talent for, and strong commitment to, research. Each applicant is required to submit a sample of written work, preferably a research paper that demonstrates careful use of primary documents. Applicants are also required to take the general aptitude portions of the Graduate Records Examination. An ability to read at least one foreign language is also expected.
The Department offers fellowships for five years which provide tuition and a stipend to all incoming students, as well as some funds for summer support and research travel. Normally, each student is required to perform four semesters of supervised teaching or research duties at some point during the graduate program, most often as a teaching assistant during the second and fourth years. Full information on the graduate program can be found in the graduate handbook.