The Department of History trains students to be
professional historians in a range of careers. Students in our graduate
program receive mentoring from a faculty that includes specialists in
the history of the United States, Latin America, Europe, the Middle
East, Africa, and Asia. Our curriculum emphasizes the building blocks of
historical methods, including historiography, archival research, and
critical thinking. Students use written archives, visual sources, oral
history, and material culture to explore the past from a variety of
perspectives. Our M.A. and Ph.D. graduates are employed in colleges and
universities, secondary schools, and museums and other public humanities
institutions.
We offer several interdisciplinary programs:
Many of our students combine their historical training with one of our certificate programs:
- The Museum Studies certificate provides hands-on knowledge of public history and public-serving historical and cultural institutions.
- Students
in the M.A. program may also pursue a certificate in secondary social studies education, which will allow them to teach middle school or high
school social studies; for more details, contact the program
coordinators at socialstudiesed@udel.edu.
Students
who pursue their graduate training in History at the University of
Delaware have access to a wealth of additional resources. In addition to
serving as teaching assistants, we sponsor numerous graduate
assistantships at area cultural institutions and at partnering offices
on campus, including the Winterthur Museum, the Hagley Library, the
Delaware Historical Society, the Nemours House and Gardens, and the
University of Delaware Library Special Collections. Many of our graduate
students participate in the collaborative team that produces the
award-winning Colored Conventions Project,
a digital archive and resource about African American political
organizing in the nineteenth century. The department maintains close
ties with the University’s Center for American Material Culture, which hosts interdisciplinary conferences and supports student research.
The
History Department is committed to maintaining a small, highly
selective graduate program to ensure that our students receive rigorous
training as scholars, teachers, and museum/historical society
professionals. Graduate students develop close working relationships
with faculty and fellow students, and they compete successfully for
jobs. We provide highly competitive funding packages with up to five
years of funding (tuition waiver plus stipend) to our Ph.D. students and
two years of funding (tuition waiver plus stipend) to nearly all of our
M.A. students. (Please see Financial Aid & Awards for details.) We offer numerous awards for excellence in scholarship and teaching, as well as generous summer stipends.
The application deadline for all programs is January 5th. Apply online through our Graduate Studies Office online application Slate system.
For questions or more information about our graduate programs contact our Graduate Program Coordinator, Ms. Diane Clark at dianec@udel.edu.
