Award-Winning Faculty
The Department of History at the University of Tennessee features an award-winning faculty that provides a comprehensive undergraduate curriculum. We offer graduate programs in three clusters: 1. Modern Europe, with an emphasis on German history; 2. American history, with special emphasis on African-American history, Atlantic and transnational history, early American history, nineteenth century history, religious history, and southern history; and, 3. Pre-Modern history (ca. 300-1600), with particular strengths in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages (ca. 300-1000 CE) and the late Medieval and Reformation period (ca. 1250-1550 CE) as well as religious and inter-religious history, gender studies, and textual studies (manuscripts, transmission, and print culture). The Department houses editorial projects on the presidential papers of Andrew Jackson and James Polk. We also work closely with interdisciplinary institutes and centers on campus, most importantly the Marco Institute and the Center for the Study of Tennesseans and War.
View our faculty by thematic field below—their work clusters around a number of research themes shown below. Interested in knowing which faculty focus on certain regions? Check out our Areas of Study page!
Capitalism / Business
As it was practiced throughout much of the twentieth century, economic history was a heavily quantitative field. In recent years, historians of capitalism and business have built upon the foundation of economic history but have added new emphasis on culture, labor, race, gender, and sexuality, while balancing qualitative and quantitative methods.
Colonialism / Imperialism / Empire
Historians of Colonialism / Imperialism / Empire study the ways that states have endeavored to exercise power over multiple peoples, across vast spaces, whether through direct and indirect rule, diplomacy and soft power, or military force. They consider both how colonial states / empires functioned politically, economically, and ideologically as well as the experiences and ambitions of those subject to imperial / colonial rule. Some common themes explored by historians of colonialism / imperialism include: violence and resistance, production of social difference, intellectual and cultural exchange, and relations of (inter)dependence.Website
Environment
Environmental historians study three key questions: how have humans shaped the non-human world? How has the non-human world shaped the course of human history? And how have human cultures perceived and understood the non-human world – that which we often describe as “nature”?
Gender / Sexuality
Historians in this sub-discipline examine how gender and sexuality are socially constructed and change over time according to changing political, economic, religious, and cultural contexts. Using an array of interdisciplinary methodologies, they situate gender and sexuality in their intersections with other social and identity categories such race, class, ability, and nationality; in this way, they reveal the ongoing and deeply historical legacies of structural inequities such as sexism, racism, patriarchy, and heteronormativity.
Global / Transnational / Borderlands
For most of the past century and a half, historians explored their research almost exclusively within national boundaries, which they saw as the natural and inherent containers for narrating the human experience. Global, transnational, and borderlands historians push against this, showing the way that history was never neatly contained within individual nations but often washed over and across such units.
Intellectual
Intellectual history covers the ideas and thinkers that have shaped history, up to the present day. How does the realm of thought interact with social and political realities, shape culture, and engage existential quandaries?
Memory
Historians of memory are interested in questions of how the past is remembered, articulated, represented in both public and private spaces, or conveniently forgotten in the name of present-day concerns. They use diverse methods to produce / gather and analyze a variety of sources, from oral traditions, to individual life stories, to monuments and other public sites of recollection.
Political
Political historians explore how power is distributed, wielded, and contested. Using a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods to study elections, governance, state formation, activism, organization, and rhetoric, political historians seek to understand change and continuity in the use and allocation of power in diverse societies and time periods.
Race / Ethnicity
Historians of race and ethnicity study how these ostensibly natural–but in fact socially constructed–categories have been created, deployed, and contested over time. How are these identities lived? How do they intersect with other identities, such as class or gender? How are they entwined with other histories, from labor and economics to cultural and intellectual expression?
Religion
Historians of religion seek to illuminate the human agency that has shaped religious doctrine and practice throughout the globe beginning with our first records of human society. At UTK, our faculty often investigate the particular contexts in which religious traditions proliferated, how religious traditions have interacted with one another, and how they have shaped the societies in which they exist, including their participation and effects on knowledge, the arts, and politics.
Science / Medicine / Technology
Historians of medicine are interested in the development of medicine as a field of inquiry and practice as well as histories of culturally diverse notions of health, the body, wellness, and affliction. Traditionally historians in this field focus on Western practices, digging deeply into the triumphs of modern medicine and how experts came to their knowledge of the biological and chemical processes that cause illness. Historians of non-Western medicine also explore how healers from many cultures come to holistic understanding of bodily suffering–examining in the patient’s social and emotional milieu, often prescribing spiritual or reparative rituals (along with herbal or drug-based remedies) to help restore balance and health. Historians of science and technology study the various ways that these spheres and their practitioners (be they scientists, engineers, or others) shape, and are shaped by, our society, politics, and culture.
Slavery / Emancipation
Historians of slavery and emancipation study the processes of enslavement, exploitation, resistance, abolition, and the enduring legacies of slavery throughout the Atlantic World. Diverse approaches to the histories of slavery and emancipation engage with questions about empire, racism, identity, nationalism, labor, gender, capitalism, politics, and memory. Many scholars who study slavery and emancipation use interdisciplinary methods to reconstruct the lived experiences of enslaved communities and freed people from their own perspectives, which are often challenging to recover using traditional historical sources.
Urban
For urban historians, cities are texts that can be read. Urban spaces and the built environment are created, appropriated, and assigned meanings. They are sites of negotiation. They are manifestations of political agendas, of gendered hierarchies, of economic and cultural trends, and more.
War and Society
Over the past fifty years, historians have broadened the study of war (moving beyond traditional and technical military history) to incorporate the many reciprocal relationships between military conflicts and the societies involved in these crises. The study of war and society covers soldiers and combat, families and home fronts, refugees and displacements, the causes of war and the nature of its aftermath, governing bodies and military policies, ideologies and war aims, researchers and military technology, entrepreneurs and logistics, doctors and military medicine, memory, trauma, and monuments, and much more.
A historian’s goal is to find as many different clues about why something turned out the way it did in order to uncover and share multifaceted explanations for historical phenomena.
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