Welcome to the History Graduate Program at Brown University
Director of Graduate Studies: Prof. Joan Richards.
Brown's doctoral and master's programs in History offer professional training in historical research, theory, criticism, and teaching.
The History Department has a diverse faculty representing a wide range of historical interests. They regularly publish books and articles in periods from the Ancient to the Modern, from the Americas to Europe to Asia and Africa. Their interests focus on a wide variety of historical foci, including intellectual, cultural, political, and social. The department is continually at work to expand into new areas, like Atlantic History, and to establish thematic connections among apparently disparate fields. These have created more or less formal clusters of faculty members around themes such as Empires and Cultures; Science, Technology, Environment and Medicine (STEaM); Borderlands, Citizenship, and the State; Gender, Sexuality and the Body; and Race and Ethnicity.
The first two years and a half of the doctoral program are devoted to course work, and the fulfillment of the foreign language requirement. We expect graduate students to take the qualifying examination in the middle of the third year. Their remaining time in the program is given to the writing of the dissertation. We expect this project to involve research and to demonstrate potential to become a book or series of articles during the early years of the student's career as college or university professor.
Brown's doctoral program trains graduate students to become teachers as well as researchers. Thus we require that, with only rare exceptions, students teach for at least three years as assistants to members of the History Department faculty. This teaching begins in the second year of the program. As part of the requisite course work, all students are required to take a series of courses—the Workshop, Colloquium, Professionalization Seminar and Proposal Seminar—all of which are designed to prepare students to be professional historians. To facilitate the development of their teaching skills, we assign students to work in both large and relatively small courses. We are convinced that the intellectual relationship between teaching and research is one that stands a college or university teacher in good stead for the duration of his or her career, and therefore try to assign graduate students, whenever possible, to teach courses related to their general area of research and thus to work with faculty who may serve as appropriate mentors.
