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Duke Univ.

Department Web Site

Areas of Specialization:

Third World, military and science, medieval, modern Europe, America

Program Description

The Duke History Department offers graduate training leading to the M.A. and Ph.D. in a wide range of fields. The most common are Early and Modern North America, African-American, Colonial and Modern Latin America, Caribbean, Military, Early Modern Europe, Modern Europe, and British and British Empire; but we also train students in Medieval Europe, Imperial and Soviet Russia, South Asia, Traditional and Modern China, Modern Japan, Africa, History of Medicine, and History of Science and Technology.
Our program places a premium on cultivating intellectual breadth, familiarity with global, comparative, and transnational history, and the ability to speak to a broad audience of historians and others interested in careful analysis of the past. We seek to build intellectual community across the boundaries of era, geography, and thematic approach.
The department now matriculates about 10 Ph.D. students a year, two to three JD-MAs, and an occasional Masters student. Students admitted to the Ph.D. program receive five-year funding packages from the graduate school, including tuition, a stipend, a teaching assistantship, gradership, or research assistantship, and health insurance. Comparatively small incoming classes allow for close relationships with faculty, as well as individually tailored courses of study. History graduate students receive numerous opportunities to teach, both as Teaching Assistants and eventually, on their own, both at Duke and other area colleges and universities.
The department revamped its graduate program in 2003 as part of its participation in the Carnegie Foundation Initiative on the Doctorate. We have adopted a new curriculum for the first two years of study, which includes a three-seminar sequence required of all students (one course on historiography/social theory, one on research methods, and one on teaching), as well as a new set of guidelines for mentoring and for student progress through the program. In our process for admission to candidacy for the Ph.D. we have replaced the traditional preliminary examinations with a portfolio of written work and teaching materials.

Special Programs or Resources

Duke is also a part of rich, regional academic network that includes the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill , North Carolina State University in Raleigh , and North Carolina Central University , also in Durham , as well as a slew of Triangle-wide history reading groups, many of which hold monthly sessions at the National Humanities Center . Cross-registration and use of libraries, as well as cooperative programs, are a major asset. Duke's own library system is one of the leading institutions in the country, holding in excess of 5,000,000 volumes and a highly regarded Special Collections library, both of which have particular strength in history. The nearby University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill has a comparable collection, which is further complemented by the library holdings of North Carolina State University, and North Carolina Central University . Together these institutions comprise the Triangle Research Libraries Network, one of the strongest humanities and social science research facilities in the United States.