Department of History

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 have instead turned to global, maritime, and borderlands history. The transregional field permits students to pursue research projects which cross modern political borders and which span oceans, with a particular (but not exclusive) focus on the early modern period, when national and imperial borders were especially contested and porous. Atlantic history is one particular strength of the transregional field (Games, Rothman, McNeill), but students can also find scholars currently lodged in different regional fields who will enable them to study other oceanic basins, including the Mediterranean and the Pacific. The History Department also contains scholars who work on borderlands and frontiers within geographic landmasses (McKittrick and Voll in Africa, Millward in Asia) and who pursue transregional projects in a global context (McNeill, Games, Benedict). Students in the transregional field will enroll every semester in a standing field seminar which will focus especially on making use of the rich archival resources in the Washington area. For more information, please contact Professor John McNeill.