Welcome to the University of Michigan History Department. Please explore our website to learn about our graduate programs (including three joint degree programs), opportunities for undergraduates, and the wide variety of courses offered. The research fields of the eighty faculty members illustrate the exceptional breadth and depth of the department. If you have questions not answered here, please email umhistory@umich.edu or check the staff directory.

The Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies
The Frances and Kenneth Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies advances historical research and teaching with powerful new tools for supporting visiting scholars, enriching the intellectual climate for faculty and graduate students, and extending knowledge across campus. Through lectures, workshops and other programs designed to foster scholarly exchange, the Eisenberg Institute promises to transform the teaching and study of history at Michigan.

The 2009-2011 theme is "Paucity & Plenty, Enactments and Expectations." Visit the EIHS website for more information (http://www.lsa.umich.edu/eihs).

NEWS AND EVENTS

The department welcomes several new faculty members in 2009-2010. Read their biographies on the “New Faculty” page.

The 2009 LSA Annual Staff Achievement Awards have been announced and the History Department is proud to report that Connie Hamlin, Executive Secretary to the Chair and Associate Chair, received the Kay Beattie Distinguished Staff Award. Connie is the third recipient of this award which honors her long and distinguished record of work in the department. Her knowledge, skills, memory, generosity, unfailing good humor, and all-round competence contribute immensely to the smooth functioning of the department. The History Department Graduate Program Support Team (Diana Denney, Lorna Altstetter and Kathleen King) were finalists for the Outstanding Staff Team Award.


The College of Literature, Science, and the Arts is pleased to announce the Charles Tilly Collegiate Professorship in Social and Political History Inaugural Lecture
“Affective Communities: the Contradictions of National and Soviet Identity in the USSR"
Given By:
Ronald G. Suny, Professor of Social and Political History
Tuesday, December 8, 2009 ~ 4:10 p.m.
Rackham Amphitheater – 4th floor
Lecture and reception open to the public

The following lecture abstract has been provided by Professor Suny:
Nations should be considered as much “affective communities” as imagined communities,” and the development of nations in the Soviet Union was a project of created emotional ties both to ones ethnic nation and to the USSR as a whole.  The tensions and contradictions between Soviet identity and ethnonational identity were experienced for much of the seventy years of Soviet power and have come down to the post-Soviet nation-states as they pull in one direction toward exclusivist ethnic nationalism and in another to integration into the larger globalized world.

A conference on 'The Production of Knowledge in Africa' will be convened on December 11 and 12 in the History Department (1014 Tisch Hall). The conference honors Professor David William Cohen on the occasion of his retirement. It is an occasion to celebrate his work, to look into the unlikely corners were knowledge about Africa is made and recast, and to work toward a more democratic approach to the study of African history and anthropology.
The conference begins on Friday at 1:00 pm until 5:30. Saturday’s events will run from 9:00 am until 6:00 pm.

Professor Kathleen Canning is featured as one of the nation’s great professors in a Fall 2009 issue of Newsweek magazine. The article describes her unique teaching style that challenges students on hot-button issues from the past as she attempts to show how historic events and mistakes relate to current situations. article pdf

Philip J. Deloria received a collegiate professorship, one of the highest honors from the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, which he named the Carroll Smith-Rosenberg Collegiate Professor of History.

Charles Bright has been appointed to an Arthur F. Thurnau Professorship by the University of Michigan Board of Regents. This honorary title is given for outstanding contributions to undergraduate education. more in the University Record.

Graduate students Lauren Hirschberg (History) and Monica Patterson (Anthropology and History) are recipients of the 2009 Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Awards, two of twenty winners across the campus.

The Graduate Committee is pleased to announce that Nathan Connolly's dissertation, By Eminent Domain: Race and Capital in the Building of an American South Florida, has won the 2009 Arthur Fondiler Dissertation Award in History.

Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies

http://www.lsa.umich.edu/eihs

Giving to the Department of History

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Featured Courses

Winter 2010 Courses
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Open GSI Positions

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Affiliated PhD Programs