This is a new focus area of the department. With recent additions to our faculty, we now have a breadth of specializations that make it possible for us to focus upon this important new field of historical study.

In the past two decades global history has become increasingly important in the scholarly analysis of the nature and scope of human interaction. In this highly interdisciplinary field transnational, trans-regional, and transoceanic frameworks replace traditional ones and shift focus to connective exchanges, flows, and networks and to how human experiences and histories are integrated with larger global processes at the same time that they are lived at local levels. This reconceptualization of history is not limited to the development of globalization in the modern world, but is also concerned with interactive processes through human history — such as trade, cultural exchange, and migration — and specifically with interpretations that do not inherently privilege Western narratives and experiences.

The global history focus area offers a core of courses that include Studies in Global History, Historical Geography, and Globalization and Its Discontents, each of which addresses historiographical and broad thematic and methodological issues. The focus area offers other courses on a variety of topics. Some of them are team-taught around central themes such as urbanism, cross-cultural trade, imperialism and colonialism, slavery, or the environment, which span a wide range of places and times. Others are in more specialized topics such as the Atlantic World, International Relations in the Ancient World, Crime and Punishment in the Modern World, Imperialism in the Modern World, and Women in a Global World. Some of these, such as the Historiography of the Modern Middle East, may be limited to more specific world regions but still tap into the themes and methods of global history.

Since global history is interdisciplinary, scholars teaching and doing research in other fields add support to this focus area. Moreover, the History Department itself has a large number of faculty who can contribute to this focus area. Those named here are faculty members whose work specifically incorporates global frameworks and perspectives. Dr. Guiomar Dueñas-Vargas specializes in the history of gender and women. Although her focus is Latin America, her research and teaching engages broader themes of feminist and global history. Dr. Dueñas-Vargas is also concerned with the roles of subaltern populations, the state, and the public sphere, and has taught Globalization and Its Discontents. In the ancient world, the Near East and Mediterranean basin experienced some of humanity’s first experiments with long distance trade, imperialism and international diplomacy. Dr. Peter Brand specializes in Ancient Egypt’s New Kingdom, ca. 1500-1000 BCE. This was Egypt’s imperial age when it colonized Nubia and expanded militarily into the Levant. The pharaohs of this age engaged in warfare and sophisticated diplomatic and trade relations with neighboring civilizations in Africa, the Near East and the Aegean. Dr. Brand also teaches Classical history, allowing him to develop courses that continue these themes for Greek and Roman civilization down until the end of Antiquity. Dr. Kent Schull researches the history of the late Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East. His specialties include nation-state construction, nationalism, crime and punishment, and the impact of European imperialism on the Middle East. Other interests include the history of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, Islamic nationalism, terrorism, globalization, and modernity as they apply to the Middle East.

Dr. Catherine Phipps researches Japan’s late-nineteenth-century imperialism by focusing on Japan’s economic, cultural, and political networks in Asia at the regional level while also examining how local empire-building developed links to global trade and transportation networks, especially through the British empire. Dr. Phipps’ other areas of interest include East Asian regionalism, historical geography, comparative imperialisms, and cities of empire. Dr. Scott Marler’s research focuses on The Atlantic World, especially the mercantile community of nineteenth-century New Orleans. His future research will continue to center around merchant capital, particularly the roles it played in slavery, commodities networks, and various sites of Atlantic World development. Dr. Marler also works on the US South, business and economic history, and historiography and theory. Dr. Stephen Stein’s work focuses on late 19th and early 20th-century American imperialism. Dr. James Blythe continues to play a key role in the development and teaching of the department’s required Global History seminar for graduate students.