Graduate Study
Director of Graduate Studies: Professor Peter
Sigal
Assistant to the DGS: Robin Ennis
Phone: (919) 681-5746
Office: 212A Carr Building
The Duke History Department offers graduate training leading to the M.A. and Ph.D. in a wide range of fields. The most common are Early America, Modern America, African-American, Colonial and Modern Latin America, Military, Early Modern Europe, Modern Europe, and British and British Empire; but we also train students in Medieval Europe, Imperial and Soviet Russia, South Asia, Traditional and Modern China, Modern Japan, Africa, History of Medicine, and History of Science and Technology.
The department now matriculates 10-12 Ph.D. students a year, with a smaller number of JD-MAs, and an occasional Masters student. Students admitted to the Ph.D. program generally receive multi-year funding packages from the graduate school, including tuition waivers, a stipend, and a teaching assistantship or gradership. Comparatively small incoming classes allow for close relationships with faculty, as well as individually tailored courses of study. History graduate students receive numerous opportunities to teach, both as T.A.s and eventually, on their own, both at Duke and other area colleges and universities.
Over the past two years, the department has revamped its graduate program as part of its participation in the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate, a multi-year endeavor of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. We have adopted a new curriculum for the first two years of study, which includes a three-seminar sequence required of all students (one course on historiography/social theory, one on research methods, and one on teaching), as well as a new set of guidelines for mentoring and for student progress through the program. We have also substantially revised our process for admission to candidacy for the Ph.D., replacing traditional preliminary examinations with the development of a portfolio of essays and teaching materials, as well as an oral defense of that portfolio. In 2005-06, we expect to develop a new dissertation-writing colloquium.
Duke's graduate school has been extremely supportive of our Carnegie-related endeavors. This semester, the graduate school furnished us with over $40,000 in funds to facilitate our reforms, including $30,000 for summer research grants to rising 2nd-year students, and $5000 to support the creation of a more interactive website for our graduate program.
Our program places a premium on cultivating intellectual breadth, familiarity with global, comparative, and transnational history, and the ability to speak to a broad audience of historians and others interested in careful analysis of the past. We seek to build intellectual community across the boundaries of era, geography, and thematic approach.
Duke is also a part of rich, regional academic network that includes the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill , North Carolina State University in Raleigh , and North Carolina Central University , also in Durham , as well as a slew of Triangle-wide history reading groups, many of which hold monthly sessions at the National Humanities Center . Cross-registration and use of libraries, as well as cooperative programs, are a major asset. Duke's own library system is one of the leading institutions in the country, holding in excess of 5,000,000 volumes and a highly regarded Special Collections library, both of which have particular strength in history. The nearby University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill has a comparable collection, which is further complemented by the library holdings of North Carolina State University, and North Carolina Central University. Together these institutions comprise the Triangle Research Libraries Network, one of the strongest humanities and social science research facilities in the United States .