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Summary Description The PhD in history is like an apprenticeship. Students learn the craft of history in seminars, researching and writing papers while receiving feedback and direction from professors. Dissertation topics often emerge from these seminars and are usually either source driven or question driven. Both require studying historical documents in archives. While investigating historical documents at archives, PhD history students often reformulate and revise research questions. The end product of this process is the dissertation: a document proving one's ability to formulate research questions, conduct research, and synthesize questions and sources into a scholarly document.
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Tools and Resources Students in the Department of History use graduate seminars, libraries, and archives to pose and investigate research questions. The University of Texas has numerous archives and collections that facilitate this process. Examples include:
Imagined Nations: Nations, Civilizations, Modernities
Roger Hart's Spring 2003 graduate seminar focused on how historians question and interpret other cultures and histories.
Harry Ransom Center
Rare books and manuscripts
LBJ Library and Museuem
US History, Vietnam War, Diplomatic History
Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection
Rare books, manuscripts, and historical documents of Latin America
Woodward and Bernstein Watergate Papers: 1964-2001
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Goals for Students Upon completing the degree, PhD students should have mastery of a primary field of historical study and a comprehensive knowledge of a secondary or thematic field (e.g., Gender, Trans-Atlantic history, World History). The Department of History trains PhD students to become scholars in both teaching and research. PhD candidates teach at a variety of institutions from small liberal arts colleges to large research universities.
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Reflections: Michael Bednar My dissertation examines Sanskrit and Persian battle narratives of 14th and 15th century India to understand emerging social identities and the concept of history in premodern India. I came to the University of Texas on a Title IV foreign language fellowship that was renewed for two additional years. During this time I overloaded my schedule with two history seminars and two foreign language courses to learn the theory and lagnuages necessary for my research project. I completed my qualifying exams in the Summer of 2000 with advanced coursework in Sanskit, Persian, Hindi, and Urdu. I conducted archival research on Fulbright-Hays and University fellowships from 2000-2003. I will defend my dissertation in 2006. My experiences are similar to those described on this page: learning how to pose research questions, finding the answers to those questions in archives, revising and reinterpreting my original research, publishing and defending this research in a dissertation.
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How Do We Know? PhD students are continually evaluated by professors in seminar courses. Students are also evaluated at the end of their first year, the completion of the Master's thesis, during written and oral qualifying exams, and their dissertation defense. Graduate students were graded with letter grades of A, B, C, D, F. Starting in the Fall semester of 2005, all graduate students will be graded with plus/minus letter grades ( A, A-, etc.). From 2002-2005, the Department of History placed all graduating Ph.D. candidates (35 total) in positions.
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History in the Future The Department is also in the process of replacing regional supporting fields with thematic fields. This should contextualize the PhD student's primary field of research (e.g., Africa) into a large comprehensive field of inquiry (Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade).
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