European History

European history is a rapidly growing field within the Department, with four new hires in the past two years. The program embraces the idea of the new Europe, integrating diverse geographic regions to shape thematic and transnational specializations. The geographic parameters of the European program extend from Britain to Russia and include the Mediterranean world.

The current European faculty has teaching and research strength in classical, medieval, and modern Europe, with a particular emphasis in the history of the twentieth century. Recent scholarly publications focus on migration history, labor and working class culture, gender and ethnicity, education, science and medicine, issues of state security, and legal and institutional history.

Graduate students can choose primary fields in Mediterranean History, Western, Central, Eastern Europe, or Russia, or can construct a field that bridges traditional divisions. The program draws on the Department’s strengths in labor, migration, gender, ethnic studies and world history, and encourages linkages with other departmental centers of global study, including the Atlantic World, African, Latin American and Caribbean, and the history of East and South Asia.

The Department also has close ties to European historians in James Madison College, the Lyman Briggs School, the new Residential College in Arts and Humanities, and elsewhere on campus. Students are encouraged to enroll in courses for history credit in these outside units. Europeanists work closely with the Center for European and Russian/Eurasian Studies at MSU, the Migration Studies Initiative, and the Jewish Studies Program as scholarly centers for their work.

In addition, the Departments of Languages and Linguistics, Romance and Classical, and Spanish and Portuguese offer courses in many of the languages European historians require for their work.