Graduate Program

The Ph.D. program in history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, emphasizes an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approach to historical studies, encouraging innovative thinking about global historical processes. We offer a rigorous program of instruction and independent work that trains students in the techniques of original historical research and equips them to teach history at the college and university levels and work in public history contexts. We admit highly motivated students qualified to pursue advanced studies in history whose interests match the specific strengths of our faculty. We offer students intensive, one-on-one advising that allows them to craft a specialized program drawing on resources throughout the campus.

Research and Teaching Fields

The department offers training in three geographically and chronologically defined research and teaching fields: East Asian history since 1600, U.S. history, European history since 1500. It also offers an additional teaching field in world history since 1500.

East Asian, U.S., and European history are offered as primary teaching fields; each graduate student is required to choose one. Every year the faculty in each primary field offer introductory readings seminars and, when possible, classes on more specific topics. We encourage students to conceptualize these fields in a global context, looking beyond shifting borders of nation-states to examine transnational dynamics in defining their primary field. Students of U.S. history may incorporate Latin American and Caribbean history in their course work; students of all fields may include the history of colonialism and imperialism. Each graduate student also prepares a secondary teaching field, distinct from the primary field, and may choose from among East Asian, European, U.S. or world history. Students may petition the Graduate Committee to prepare a secondary teaching field in African or Latin American history.

World History

UC Santa Cruz is proud to be the home of a pioneering program in world history--a field in increasing demand among colleges and universities hiring new faculty. For over a decade the History Department has offered seminars, conferences, and guest speakers involving scholars from all over the world interested in developing new paradigms for teaching and writing about global historical processes, coordinated by Professor Edmund Burke through the UCSC Center for World History. The graduate program offers a two-quarter seminar in which students prepare a secondary field in teaching world history.

Faculty interest in world history also shapes all three of the department's primary teaching and research fields. Faculty research within U.S. history, for example, includes the colonial Atlantic world; the transnational and comparative study of slavery; the U.S.-Mexico borderlands; memories of World War II in Japan, the Pacific, and the U.S.; the African diaspora; and transnational labor solidarity and the politics of trade. Indeed, we are unique among history graduate programs in the U.S. in that all our U.S. history faculty conceptualize their research in transnational terms. Our East Asian scholars offer particular interests in the history of labor, gender, and sexuality; urban history; the world history of science; East Asian colonial empires; and rural lives, problems, and social movements. Our historians of Europe offer global perspectives on utopianism and social movements, early modern labor and social protest, intellectual history, and Jewish history. Our European faculty also includes Mark Cioc, editor of Environmental History, a journal that explores global perspectives on environmental history.

Research Clusters

UCSC's History Department offers a series of thematic research clusters to coordinate for graduate students, which cut across national/geographical fields and offer further opportunity for original analysis and research. Each research cluster is composed of several history faculty members and graduate students as well as faculty outside the department, who share broad scholarly interests. Although the nature and number of research clusters may change over time, the department currently offers two themes: 1) gender, 2) colonialism, race, and nationalism.

The research clusters dovetail with our emphasis on global history to foster creative thinking about the intersection of gender, race, and colonialism with transnational historical processes. The faculty of each cluster provide at least one research seminar every other year in addition to readings courses. All affiliated graduate students must take at least one research seminar during their first two years; they are encouraged to take more than one.

Our combination of research seminars and other cluster activities ensures not only that graduate students build close, sustained working relationships with faculty but also that students at all levels, from first-year to advanced, share common intellectual experiences. Faculty and students meet informally, for example, to read and discuss each others' work and bring in outside speakers.

Campuswide Resources

Because of UC Santa Cruz's unique history in encouraging interdisciplinary intellectual life, history graduate students are also able to draw on an unusually broad range of resources outside the department in developing their work. Faculty with Ph.D.s in history are affiliated with many programs at UCSC outside the History Department, including American studies, community studies, Latin American and Latino studies, and the history of consciousness. Other scholars bring interdisciplinary approaches to historical studies in these departments as well as in literature, anthropology, politics, and sociology, theater arts, art history, and other programs. Typically, history graduate students in our program work very closely with two or three faculty members outside the department--through independent studies, qualifying exam committees, or Ph.D. dissertation committees. Our students also work with faculty members at other universities in the Bay Area such as Stanford, UC Berkeley, or UC San Francisco.

The UCSC campus offers a rich array of interdisciplinary intellectual activities. The Center for Cultural Studies offers a vibrant series of guest speakers, conferences, and discussion groups. The Institute for Humanities Research funds graduate student and faculty research and travel, graduate student workshops, and guest speakers that bring together scholars from the Humanities Division and beyond. Students can take advantage of ongoing speaker series, conferences, and workshops offered by the Chicano/Latino Research Center, the Center for World History, Jewish Studies, the Dickens Project, and the Institute for Advanced Feminist Research. Advanced graduate students may also have the opportunity to work in programs sponsored by the University of California Humanities Research Institute at UC Irvine.

M.A. Program

The department also offers a Master's degree separate from its Ph.D. program. It is intended for those individuals who are interested in postgraduate work but who are not planning to complete a Ph.D. It is a degree program that can fulfill in-service education requirements for current teachers as well as for future teachers earning a single subject credential in Social Studies.