The Department of History offers both the MA degree and the PhD. The master’s degree is awarded in Premodern Europe, Modern Europe, or United States. PhDs are awarded in specialized fields in US History and European History.

Pre-Modern European History

The UT history department offers an MA and PhD concentration in European and Mediterranean history before 1600, working closely with the Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Candidates receive their degrees in history, but are encouraged to participate widely in the interdisciplinary life of the institute, which brings together faculty and graduate students from eight different UT departments. Within the Medieval and Renaissance History concentration, students are encouraged to focus in one of the department’s areas of strength: Mediterranean History, Late Antiquity, the Early Middle Ages, Medieval Religious and Cultural History, the Later Middle Ages, and Continental Reformation.

Our faculty have won numerous national and international research awards, including the NEH, ACLS, and Fulbright Fellowships, the Rome Prize, and the National-Humanities Center Fellowship. We publish widely and actively encourage graduate participation in the scholarly world. We are supported by faculty in other departments who serve on graduate committees and take part in training students in the technical, linguistic, and methodological tools that are necessary to study late antique, medieval, and Renaissance history. There are presently about twenty students working on graduate degrees on Late Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and Renaissance in the history department.

Modern European History (Modern Europe + Modern Germany)

Modern European history, especially modern German history, is an area of special strength in UTK’s history department. The department boasts four historians of Germany, a constellation rare among American universities, and historians of France and Eastern Europe. Robert Bast (formerly director of the MARCO Institute at UTK) is a specialist in late Medieval and Reformation Germany, with an emphasis on the politics of religion. Monica Black specializes in Germany during the era of the World Wars; a cultural historian, her work focuses thematically on religion, folklore, the rituals and practices surrounding death, and the history of sickness and health. Denise Phillips is an historian of science with research interests in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Germany. Her past work has explored the interactions between science and public culture in German-speaking Europe; she also has interests in the history of natural history, the history of agriculture, and the role of science in the Enlightenment. Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius specializes in modern German history (nineteenth and twentieth centuries), especially German relations with Eastern Europe, and European diplomatic history.

Specialists in French and Eastern European History fortify the department’s Modern European concentration. Margaret Cook Andersen is a specialist in the history of Modern France and its colonial empire, with special interests in anxieties about political power and population, and in the French pronatalist movement. Victor Petrov specializes in modern Balkan history and the Cold War era in a global perspective. Thematically, his work deals with histories of technology and the information society, as well as wider questions about utopian projects and techno-politics.

American History

The History Department’s staffing and resources are strong in American history. Current American history faculty include Robert Bland in African-American, southern, and Reconstruction history, Kristen Block in slavery and the Atlantic World, Ernest Freeberg in nineteenth and twentieth century cultural history, Luke Harlow in the antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction eras, the U.S. South, and in religion, Susan Lawrence in the history of medicine, Christopher Magra in early America and the Atlantic World, Tore Olsson in twentieth-century U.S., southern, transnational, and agrarian history, Brandon Winford in African-American and civil rights history, and Michael Woods in nineteenth-century political and cultural history.

Current and recent doctoral dissertations include such topics as the origins of American religious camp meetings, tea and global cultural transfer in early America, Jacksonian political culture and patronage networks, the production and consumption of cut flowers across the twentieth-century Americas, American missionaries and empire in nineteenth- and early-twentieth century Japan and Okinawa, and radical counter-geographies in early Arkansas. Our graduate students have a strong record of winning external fellowships to facilitate their research. In recent years, students have won funding from the Social Science Research Council, the American Philosophical Society, the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, among others. Many have also been successful in securing year-long writing fellowships from the UT Humanities Center.

The department hosts both The Papers of Andrew Jackson—a major historical editing project—and the Center for the Study of Tennesseans and War, which conducts an active program of scholarship and public education. Campus library resources are particularly strong, including original manuscript collections, extensive monographic and microfilm holdings, and full access to searchable electronic archives such as Early American Imprints, the American Periodicals Series, the US Serial Set, Sabin Americana, Readex’s Early American Newspapers, and Cengage’s Nineteenth-Century US Newspapers. UT is one of only a few institutions in the country to have acquired all these databases.