History

Overview

The History program at Johns Hopkins University is designed for students who wish to proceed directly to the PhD degree and aims primarily to train students for careers as research scholars and university teachers. At the same time, we also recognize and support students who choose to pursue other career options.

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 universities and colleges in this country and abroad.

Learning outocmes

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 20th century, Latin America, Africa, Modern Russia, and China. 

Most members of our 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, urban, imperial, and gender 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 department seminar, attended by 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. These seminars create a lively intellectual community in which graduate students quickly become contributing members.

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 by the 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 specific cluster of faculty at a time of application.