PhD - Doctor of Philosophy in History - Transregional

By departmental custom and disciplinary convention, the History Department has several geographically and regionally defined graduate fields. But historians—especially several at Georgetown— increasingly work outside these traditional frameworks and instead explore global, maritime, international, transnational, and borderlands history. The Transregional field was created in 2005 in order facilitate doctoral research that crosses modern political borders and that span oceans. The Transregional field attracts students in three main areas of specialization: international history (with Higuchi, Painter, and Roshwald), environmental history (with Degroot, Higuchi, McKittrick, and McNeill), and Atlantic history (with Games, McNeill, and Rothman). Students also apply to the transregional field to study other ocean basins, including the Mediterranean and the Pacific (with Abi-Mershed, Benedict, and McNeill), borderlands and frontiers (with Millward in Asia, de Luna and McKittrick in Africa, and Benton-Cohen and Tutino in North America), and global history (with Chakravarti, Games and McNeill). Students in the Transregional field find a robust intellectual community not only in the department, but also through the programs supported by the Georgetown Institute for Global History, especially the standing seminars in Early Modern Global History (convened by Games) and International History (convened by Higuchi, McNeill, Painter, and Roshwald). These seminars enable graduate students to meet faculty, students, and other scholars in the Washington area. Special department fellowships of interest to applicants in the Transregional field include the fellowship in the history of the early modern world and the environmental history fellowship. For more information, please contact Professors John McNeill or Alison Games. Additionally, we encourage you to contact current graduate student Elena Abbott or Meredith Denning for their perspective on the program; they will also be glad to answer any questions you may have.