Fields of Inquiry
Military History
Military history at Duke University is part of a collaborative program with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). In addition to an active undergraduate curriculum in military history, Duke has been offering graduate study in the field continuously since 1959. Since that time, more than fifty students have taken the Duke History PhD degree with military history as their primary field. A much larger number have taken the M.A. degree in military history or offered military history as a minor field in their PhD programs. These degree recipients have been both civilians and serving military officers. The civilians have gone on to careers in academia, government, and the private sector, including faculty positions at major research universities. The serving officers have resumed their military careers with duty assignments reflecting their specialized educational experience; many have pursued careers in academics and scholarship upon retiring from active duty.
All study of military history at the graduate level at Duke is part of a program of study for an advanced degree in History. Graduate students with a major or minor concentration in military history take the normal course of study prescribed by the Department of History and the Duke Graduate School . They work on their military concentration with faculty at both Duke and UNC. Four courses form the core of study: an introductory reading course covering classics, works from other disciplines, and the most interesting current approaches to the field; reading colloquia in world and American military history; and a two-semester research seminar that prepares students for thesis and dissertation work at publishable standards of scholarship. The subject matter and approach are broad and interdisciplinary, related to other historical fields such as the history of technology, foreign affairs and international relations, gender, and national and comparative histories.
Students enrolled at both Duke and UNC enjoy access to the faculty, curricula, and academic resources of both institutions. A free bus service provides transportation across the eight miles separating the two schools. All students at either school are free to enroll in any courses at the sister institution. More than twenty faculty at the two schools participate in the cooperative military history program. (See the following list.) The two schools take advantage of the Triangle Research Libraries Network (TRLN), a collaborative organization of Duke; UNC, Chapel Hill; North Carolina State University; and North Carolina Central University. Among them, the four schools boast ten libraries with aggregate holdings of fourteen million volumes and annual budgets totaling eighty million dollars.
Several associated programs support the military graduate effort. The Triangle Institute for Security Studies (TISS) is a network of faculty at Triangle colleges and universities in nearly a dozen different disciplines who share an interest in national and international security, broadly defined. TISS sponsors speakers, seminars, conferences, and outreach to local and regional communities. The Research Triangle Seminar on the History of the Military, War, and Society provides a forum for historians working on issues relating to war, peace and society; it explores approaches from political, diplomatic, and institutional history as well as economic, social, cultural, and gender history, and studies of violent conflicts, peace building, and peace keeping. UNC's Curriculum in Peace, War, and Defense is an undergraduate major that focuses on the subjects of war, conflict, peace, and national and international security through an interdisciplinary approach that includes history, political science, and other humanities and social sciences. Duke University Law School 's Center on Law, Ethics, and National Security promotes teaching, research, and publication on national security law, with an emphasis on national security decision-making from an ethical perspective.
Further information may be had by contacting Dirk Bonker (db48@duke.edu) or Alex Roland (alex.roland@duke.edu).
DUKE FACULTY
Dirk Bonker (Johns Hopkins) Assistant Professor. Military history.
Margaret Humphreys (Harvard) Professor. Medicine, epidemiology, Civil War.
Anna Krylova (Johns Hopkins) Assistant Professor. Twentieth-century Russia.
Bruce Kuniholm (Duke) Professor. Middle East Policy, International Security Studies, and U.S. Foreign Policy.
Seymour Mauskopf (Princeton) Professor. History of science, gunpowder.
Martin Miller (Chicago) Professor. Imperial Russia , terrorism.
Kristen Neuschel (Brown) Associate Professor. Early modern Europe .
Alex Roland (Duke) Professor. Military history, history of technology.
Joseph Shatzmiller (Aix-en-Provence) Smart Family Professor of Judaic Studies.
Judaic studies, medieval.
Peter Sigal (UCLA), Associate Professor. Colonial Latin America , Aztecs.
UNC FACULTY
William L. Barney (Columbia) Professor. Social and political history of nineteenth-century America .
E. Willis Brooks (Stanford) Associate Professor. Nineteenth-century Russian social, administrative, military history.
Christopher R. Browning (Wisconsin) Frank Porter Graham Professor. Modern German history; holocaust studies.
Joseph T. Glatthaar (Wisconsin), Stephenson Distinguished Professor. American military history; Civil War
Karen Hagemann (Hamburg) James Kenan III Professor. Modern German and European history of military and war (18-20 C.); cultural and gender history of the nation, the military, and war.
R. Don Higginbotham (Duke) Dowd Professor. Colonial and Revolutionary America, emphasis on the eighteenth century.
Michael H. Hunt (Yale) Everett H. Emerson Professor. U.S. foreign relations, American-East Asian relations.
Richard H. Kohn (Wisconsin) Professor. U.S. military history, civil-military relations.
Wayne Lee (Duke) Associate Professor Revolutionary America , military history.
Roger W. Lotchin (Chicago) Professor. Urban political history, 1800 to the present; the American West.
W. James McCoy (Yale) Associate Professor. Ancient history, particularly Greek.
Terence I. McIntosh (Yale) Associate Professor. Early Modern Europe.
Donald Raleigh (Indiana) Professor. Twentieth-century Russian/Soviet History.
RELATED LINKS
Duke University, Durham, NC
UNC, Chapel Hill, NC
PWAD
History of the Military, War, and Society