Thematic Fields of Study

American Indian and Indigenous Studies is a vital area of study at the University of Minnesota. Three faculty trained in indigenous history offer undergraduate and graduate courses and the University houses the oldest Department of American Indian Studies in the country with a faculty offering a large curriculum in the Ojibwe and Dakota languages plus courses centering on history, literature, the cinema, political science, the legal system, anthropology, and more.

Minnesota has long been a leader in graduate training in the field, and the presence of the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Workshop offers access to this lively scholarly community for students and faculty alike. Faculty scholarship in AIIS engages with a multiplicity of approaches, including sovereignty, representations, education, public history/heritage studies, and broader connections to global indigeneity.

Faculty

• David Chang: Race and nationalism, American Indian, Native Hawaiian, 19th- and 20th-century United States
• Kirsten Fischer: Colonial and revolutionary America, United States, social and intellectual
• Patrick McNamara: Latin America, Mexico
• Jean O'Brien: Colonial American, Native American

This thematic area brings together the study of anthropological concepts of culture and cultural change, and histories of technology, communications, and the transmission of symbolic production. We are interested in the reframing of intellectual history as part of the dense fabric of cultural and social forms. We study science as practice and idea, communications media as reflections and generators of social and political change, as well as the broad category of historical subjectivities. We are also interested in philosophical thought both as a generator of novel and powerful interpretations of social life, and a reflection of situated dilemmas of culture in a specific time and place.

Faculty

• Tracey Deutsch: the United States, women's history, business
• Kirsten Fischer: Colonial and revolutionary America, United States, social and intellectual
• Andrew Gallia: Ancient history
• Malinda Lindquist: African-American and United States, Gender and Intellectual History
• Howard Louthan: Early modern Europe; Central Europe; cultural, intellectual, and religious History
• Hiromi Mizuno: Modern Japan, gender and sexuality, cultural studies of science and technology
• Helena Pohlandt-McCormick: Africa, South Africa, social and cultural history, comparative women's history
• JB Shank: Early modern Europe, France, European intellectual, history of science
• Igor Tcoukarine: 20th century Europe, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe, history of tourism
• Thomas Wolfe: European Union, Soviet Union, history of media and communications, pragmatism

The history department has a strong cohort of faculty who teach and research economic history and the history of capitalism. We work in many regions of the world, and from a variety of perspectives and methodologies, but share a commitment to understanding the historical evolution of systems of exchange, labor, and purchase that shape people's lives. We are distinguished by our capacious view of economic history. Fields of interest include labor and work, legal history, consumption and consumer society, population change and demographics, commercial practices, and the emergence and operations of capitalism. Chronologically, we span the medieval period as well as early modern and modern eras, and study locations across the globe, particularly the US, European, and Asian economies. Many of us do work that is explicitly comparative or transnational.

Faculty

• Tracey Deutsch: the United States, women's history, business
• Katharine Gerbner: Atlantic world, early America, comparative early modern, Caribbean, religion, race
• Aaron Hall: American Legal and Constitutional, Civil War and Reconstruction, American Slavery
• Christopher M Isett: Post-war East Asian political economies, global and post-war capitalism, East Asia's Cold War, comparative economic history, agrarian, 18th–20th century China
• William Jones: 20th-Century United States, Race, and Labor History
• Mary Jo Maynes: Modern Germany, European social, women
• Hiromi Mizuno: Modern Japan, gender and sexuality, cultural studies of science and technology
• Kathryn L Reyerson: Medieval Europe, Mediterranean Europe, Medieval France, social and economic history, legal history
• Ajay Skaria: South Asia, environmental history
• Barbara Y Welke: American legal and constitutional, American women's, and modern American history
• Thomas Wolfe: European Union, Soviet Union, history of media and communications, pragmatism

Many history department faculty and students explore the arenas of imperialism, colonialism, and post-colonial studies. Courses are regularly taught with a thematic, chronological, or geographic focus both at the graduate and undergraduate level. Some of the research and teaching on these themes is global in scope; some center on a particular region or empires such as the British Empire or the Japanese Empire. Thematic courses include such topics as slavery, the history of capitalism, imperialism and its critics, and imperial violence.

Faculty

• Llana Barber: Immigration, Latine History, Black Migrations, Caribbean diaspora, Modern US, and Urban History
• Sarah Chambers: Colonial Latin America; gender, cultural, and legal history
• David Chang: Race and nationalism, American Indian, Native Hawaiian, 19th and 20th century the United States
• Anna Clark: British, Irish, European, women, gender, sexuality
• Tracey Deutsch: the United States, women's history, business
• Kirsten Fischer: Colonial and revolutionary America, United States, social and intellectual
• Andrew Gallia: Ancient history
• Katharine Gerbner: Atlantic world, early America, comparative early modern, Caribbean, religion, race
• Allen F Isaacman: Central and Southern Africa
• Christopher M Isett: Post-war East Asian political economies, global and post-war capitalism, East Asia's Cold War, comparative economic history, agrarian, 18th–20th century China
• Mai Na Lee: Southeast Asia
• Hiromi Mizuno: Modern Japan, gender and sexuality, cultural studies of science and technology
• Jean O'Brien: Colonial American, Native American
• Zozan Pehlivan: Environmental History, Middle East, Modern Muslim World, and The Ottoman Empire and Ottoman Kurdistan
• Helena Pohlandt-McCormick: Africa, South Africa, social and cultural history, comparative women's history
• Ajay Skaria: South Asia, environmental history
• Theofanis G Stavrou: Russia, modern Greek studies, Eastern Orthodoxy
• Thomas Wolfe: European Union, Soviet Union, history of media and communications, pragmatism

Since the beginning of human culture, home and family have been key arenas where historical processes have unfolded. Family life, in turn, has always been shaped by local and global historical dynamics. Many historians at Minnesota investigate history through family relationships (for example, changing gender, sexual, and generational relations), or through demographic shifts (such as socio-economic patterns and trends in the age at marriage or birth and death rates), or through the roles played by family ideals in political life—for example during modernizing revolutions and during the Cold War. We work on family history in all global regions – the ancient Near East, medieval through modern Europe, Latin America, colonial and modern Africa, and East and Southeast Asia. We draw on a wide range of historical sources including archaeological evidence, fiction, art, and oral history as well as legal codes, census records, and memoirs.

Historians who work with census materials have developed huge databases housed in the Minnesota Population Center, an interdisciplinary center where researchers develop methods for studying quantitative evidence for the historical study of the family. Family life often thought of as a relatively unchanging realm of merely private and local interest, in fact, has played and continues to play a major role in world history.

Faculty

• Llana Barber: Immigration, Latine History, Black Migrations, Caribbean diaspora, Modern US, and Urban History
• Sarah Chambers: Colonial Latin America; gender, cultural, and legal history
• J. David Hacker: Demographic history, quantitative history, American Civil War
• Christopher M Isett: Post-war East Asian political economies, global and post-war capitalism, East Asia's Cold War, comparative economic history, agrarian, 18th–20th century China
• Steven Ruggles: American demographic and social history

Until recently the majority of the population lived in the countryside where food shortages and environmental crises profoundly affected people’s daily and lived experiences. Often environmental crises and food production systems have been interconnected with most environmental crises produced by human actions. The Department of History offers a wide variety of courses that explore food, the environment, and agrarian history. Several faculty conduct research and offer interdisciplinary graduate seminars on topics such as the social basis of food insecurity, coping with food shortages, indigenous knowledge and technology, environmental degradation, and landscape and history and memory. The Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change and the College of Food, Agricultural, and Natural Resource Sciences also teaches courses on related themes.

Faculty

• Tracey Deutsch: the United States, women's history, business
• Allen F Isaacman: Central and Southern Africa
• Christopher M Isett: Post-war East Asian political economies, global and post-war capitalism, East Asia's Cold War, comparative economic history, agrarian, 18th–20th century China
• Hiromi Mizuno: Modern Japan, Science and Technology, Agriculture and Environment, Empires, Global WWII
• Zozan Pehlivan: Environmental History, Middle East, Modern Muslim World, and The Ottoman Empire and Ottoman Kurdistan

Legal history and human rights is a dynamic field at the University of Minnesota with faculty and graduate students interested in law and human rights working in almost every geographic and temporal field of study, including US, Latin America, Africa, medieval, early modern, and modern Europe, and South and East Asia. Areas of special strength include personhood, citizenship, race, gender, class, sexuality, disability, childhood and family, immigration, rights, and social movements, and genocide. Minnesota’s long-history of training graduate students in legal history and human rights is sustained through the program in law and history including graduate coursework, the legal history workshop, and a close relationship with the Law School, which has faculty with special strengths in human rights, family, labor, and criminal law.

Faculty

• Susanna Blumenthal: American cultural and intellectual history, Anglo-American legal history, history of human sciences
• Sarah Chambers: Colonial Latin America; gender, cultural, and legal history
• Sheer Ganor: German-Jewish, Displacement and forced migration, Memory Diaspora Studies, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Modern Germany
• Aaron Hall: American Legal and Constitutional, Civil War and Reconstruction, American Slavery
• Christopher M Isett: Post-war East Asian political economies, global and post-war capitalism, East Asia's Cold War, comparative economic history, agrarian, 18th–20th century China
• Patrick McNamara: Latin America, Mexico
• Kathryn L Reyerson: Medieval Europe, Mediterranean Europe, Medieval France, social and economic history, legal history
• Yalile Suriel: Universities and Power, Carceral State, Higher Education, African American, Latinx, 20th Century United States
• Barbara Y Welke: American legal and constitutional, American women's, and modern American history

Political action, ideas, and institutions have long been major concerns of historians, and members of the University of Minnesota history faculty address the politics of many lands and eras from a variety of perspectives. In recent years our teaching and research about politics have focused in particular on the construction and performance of political loyalties and identities, whether by popular or elite elements, and on the social, economic, and cultural factors that have shaped political processes. Examining the development of political life, structures, loyalties, and identities as dynamic and contingent phenomena offers a rich field of inquiry. Studies of the historical development of citizenship have expanded as well, embracing issues of inclusion and exclusion and citizens' empowerment, agency, and government claims.

Faculty

• Llana Barber: Immigration, Latine History, Black Migrations, Caribbean diaspora, Modern US, and Urban History
• Sarah Chambers: Colonial Latin America; gender, cultural, and legal history
• Andrew Gallia: Ancient history
• Sheer Ganor: German-Jewish, Displacement and forced migration, Memory Diaspora Studies, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Modern Germany
• Aaron Hall: American Legal and Constitutional, Civil War and Reconstruction, American Slavery
• Mai Na Lee: Southeast Asia
• Howard Louthan: Early modern Europe; Central Europe; cultural, intellectual, and religious History
• Patrick McNamara: Latin America, Mexico
• Hiromi Mizuno: Modern Japan, gender and sexuality, cultural studies of science and technology
• Kevin Murphy: Urban, gender, and sexuality, political and cultural
• Jean O'Brien: Colonial American, Native American
• Helena Pohlandt-McCormick: Africa, South Africa, social and cultural history, comparative women's history
• Igor Tcoukarine: 20th century Europe, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe, history of tourism
• Eva von Dassow: Near East
• Barbara Y Welke: American legal and constitutional, American women's, and modern American history

Scholars in the department are interested in how collective memories of the past are produced and disseminated by a vast array of individuals and institutions across space and time. We study, for example, how individual memory shapes collective memory broader understandings of history; how the past is memorialized and mobilized by cultural and political elites as well as by disenfranchised and marginalized groups; and how museums and filmmakers mobilize historical narratives. Faculty in the Department of History offers courses that examine the theory, methods, practice, and politics of public history, explore the possibilities and challenges of the production and dissemination of histories in nonacademic settings, and interrogate the intersections of memory and history.

Faculty

• Gail Dubrow: the United States, urban, women's, Asian-American, public history
• Kirsten Fischer: Colonial and revolutionary America, United States, social and intellectual
• William Jones: 20th-Century United States, Race, and Labor History
• Mai Na Lee: Southeast Asia
• Patrick McNamara: Latin America, Mexico
• Kevin Murphy: Urban, gender, and sexuality, political and cultural
• Jean O'Brien: Colonial American, Native American
• Helena Pohlandt-McCormick: Africa, South Africa, social and cultural history, comparative women's history
• Thomas Wolfe: European Union, Soviet Union, history of media and communications, pragmatism

The race, ethnicity, migration and diasporas cluster broadly examines the movement of peoples within and beyond borders; the racial and ethnic categories and identities they inhabit, challenge, and create; racial and ethnic relations amongst and across groups; the intersections of race and ethnicity with class, gender, and sexuality; the consequences of migration; and the connections of dispersed peoples across borders. Some of us focus on one of these categories more than the others, or on one locality, group, or chronological period; some of us seek to examine multiple aspects of race, ethnicity, migration, and diaspora through comparative, transnational, and global analyses that intersect with borderlands and global history. Institutional resources like the Immigration History Research Center enhance the opportunities for work in this area.

Faculty

• Llana Barber: Immigration, Latine History, Black Migrations, Caribbean diaspora, Modern US, and Urban History
• Sarah Chambers: Colonial Latin America; gender, cultural, and legal history
• David Chang: Race and nationalism, American Indian, Native Hawaiian, 19th and 20th century the United States
• Gail Dubrow: the United States, urban, women's, Asian-American, public history
• Kirsten Fischer: Colonial and revolutionary America, United States, social and intellectual
• Sheer Ganor: German-Jewish, Displacement and forced migration, Memory Diaspora Studies, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Modern Germany
• Katharine Gerbner: Atlantic world, early America, comparative early modern, Caribbean, religion, race
• William Jones: 20th-Century United States, Race, and Labor History
• Mai Na Lee: Southeast Asia
• Malinda Lindquist: African-American, United States
• Patrick McNamara: Latin America, Mexico
• Jean O'Brien: Colonial American, Native American
• Helena Pohlandt-McCormick: Africa, South Africa, social and cultural history, comparative women's history
• Andrea Sterk: Ancient and medieval Christianity, late antiquity, Byzantium history
• Igor Tcoukarine: 20th century Europe, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe, history of tourism
• Barbara Y Welke: American legal and constitutional, American women's, and modern American history

Faculty in the Department of History working in many geographic areas engage with religion in their research and teaching. History faculty are particularly interested in how religion is inflected by race, ethnicity, and gender; the relation among religion, culture, and belief; how people perform "religious" behavior through familial and social rituals and customs; the role of religion as a cohesive as well as a disruptive force in multiethnic states or empires; the ways religious systems configure authority; pilgrimage in the context of population movements and migrations; religion and social movements; modernity, secularization, and crises of religious identity, as well as challenges to the narrative that connects modernity and secularization; religion and the public sphere; and religion in relation to science.

Religion in cross-cultural encounters is a particularly important theme for us, including religion as an aspect of colonialism; the encounter between European ways of knowing and those elsewhere; missionary enterprises and how they negotiate with prospective converts the meaning and practice of religion; religion in trading networks and diasporas; how religious norms operate in religiously plural environments; religious difference as a cause of stability and cooperation as well of instability and violence.

Faculty

• Kirsten Fischer: Colonial and revolutionary America, United States, social and intellectual
• Sheer Ganor: German-Jewish, Displacement and forced migration, Memory Diaspora Studies, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Modern Germany
• Katharine Gerbner: Atlantic world, early America, comparative early modern, Caribbean, religion, race
• Howard Louthan: Early modern Europe; Central Europe; cultural, intellectual, and religious History
• Nabil Matar: Modern Arabic literature; Arab-Islamic civilization
• JB Shank: Early modern Europe, France, European intellectual, history of science
• Ajay Skaria: South Asia, environmental history
• Theofanis G Stavrou: Russia, modern Greek studies, Eastern Orthodoxy
• Andrea Sterk: Ancient and medieval Christianity, late antiquity, Byzantium history
• Thomas Wolfe: European Union, Soviet Union, history of media and communications, pragmatism

How do networks of technology change politics, culture, social relations, and the environment? How are knowledge-making and power related? How do the class, gender, race, and environmental contexts shape science, technology, and medicine? Historical studies of science, technology, and medicine, often working closely with environmental studies, are among the most exciting new areas of the historical study of recent decades. History faculty at Minnesota is particularly interested in the cultural, intellectual, and social aspects of science and technology, from early modern to post-modern times, in the West and non-Western worlds.

The history of science, technology, and medicine means more than the development of space science, atomic weapons, genetics, or modern hospital system; it includes various ways of observing and “knowing” nature and of changing or preserving our physical and spiritual worlds, healing our bodies, and engineering society with a vision of the future. Therefore, the questions we investigate include not only how scientific discoveries are made, or how diseases are cured. We also explore how experts and knowledge-makers view the world; how scientific values clash or work together with religious, cultural, and ideological values; what technologies enable empires to be built; how science fiction envisions the future; and how our sense of time, space, and the body has been shaped through new technologies.

Faculty

• Christopher M Isett: Post-war East Asian political economies, global and post-war capitalism, East Asia's Cold War, comparative economic history, agrarian, 18th–20th century China
• Malinda Lindquist: African-American, United States
• Hiromi Mizuno: Modern Japan, Science and Technology, Agriculture and Environment, Empires, Global WWII
• JB Shank: Early modern Europe, France, European intellectual, history of science
• Barbara Y Welke: American legal and constitutional, American women's, and modern American history
• Thomas Wolfe: European Union, Soviet Union, history of media and communications, pragmatism
• Zozan Pehlivan: Environmental History, Middle East, Modern Muslim World, and The Ottoman Empire and Ottoman Kurdistan

The history department has a longstanding commitment to and an international reputation in the histories of women, gender, and sexuality. Our faculty includes prominent scholars of gender and sexuality and our alumnae consistently go on to do important work in these areas. The leading journal in the field, Gender, and History is currently edited at the University of Minnesota. Discussions of gender and sexuality history permeate much of the department’s intellectual life and are the focus of the thriving Workshop on the Comparative History of Women, Gender, and Sexuality started in 1992. Areas of particular thematic strengths include gender and legal history, imperialism and colonialism as gendered processes, religion and gender, gendered histories of capitalism, histories of girlhood, and the history of sexuality.  Comparative and transnational work is a particular strength of the department.

Faculty

• Sarah Chambers: Colonial Latin America; gender, cultural, and legal history
• Anna Clark: British, Irish, European, women, gender, sexuality
• Tracey Deutsch: the United States, women's history, business
• Gail Dubrow: the United States, urban, women's, Asian-American, public history
• Kirsten Fischer: Colonial and revolutionary America, United States, social and intellectual
• Malinda Lindquist: African-American, United States
• Kevin Murphy: Urban, gender, and sexuality, political and cultural
• Helena Pohlandt-McCormick: Africa, South Africa, social and cultural history, comparative women's history
• Kathryn L Reyerson: Medieval Europe, Mediterranean Europe, Medieval France, social and economic history, legal history
• Barbara Y Welke: American legal and constitutional, American women's, and modern American history