Pictured above are Ph.D. student Bonnie Laughlin Schultz and Journal of American History editor Ed Linenthal.

IU’s history students take advantage of a supportive but challenging learning environment.  Graduate students benefit from a range of learning and working opportunities, including Teaching College History seminars, an annual graduate conference, and a number of teaching and editorial positions.  The department graduates about a dozen Ph.Ds per year, as well as a smaller number of joint-MA/MLS students.  Our 400 undergraduate majors benefit from face-to-face interaction with faculty who have won numerous teaching awards, and who continue to create some of the most popular courses on campus, including those on the Holocaust, popular music, The Black Death, and Vietnam.

Peter Guardino, Department Chair

Greetings,

Since its founding in 1895 the IU Department of History has constituted one of the nation’s foremost communities of people actively studying history. I invite anyone interested in the past of the Department to consult Professor Madison's warm and wise history of our community, available here.  Currently our community includes more than fifty of the country’s leading professional historians, one hundred fifty graduate students, four hundred undergraduate history majors, and the eight thousand undergraduates who take at least one of our courses in any given year.  All of these people are curious about history, and many share a fierce passion about the past.

Within this unity there is great variety.  Our faculty members teach and research in a wide variety of historical fields, ranging geographically across every continent and ocean and chronologically from the ancient times to the present.  The diverse themes of their work can be explored in this website’s section on faculty.  Our many specialties are also reflected in the courses we offer to both undergraduate and graduate students.   Our undergraduate alumni go on to work in a vast variety of fields where they use not only their knowledge of history but also their training in how to analyze diverse kinds of information, form interpretations of complex phenomena, and communicate their ideas clearly.  Our graduate alumni are employed by many of the most important institutions of higher learning or move on to work for government, business, or non-profit agencies.

Our faculty members have published dozens of books and hundreds of articles, and they have been the recipients of many prestigious awards and grants.  They also edit the American Historical Review and the Journal of American History, two of the leading historical journals in the world, as well as the Indiana Magazine of History, one of the nation’s oldest and best regional history journals.  The excellence of our students is reflected in the many honors and prestigious grants they receive each year.  The quality of our research and teaching has led US News and World Report to rank us as the ninth best history department among the nation’s hundreds of public universities.

Our history community is exceptionally dynamic, vibrant, and diverse.  I invite you to use this site to learn more about who we are, what we do, and how we do it, with the hope that you might join us in our passion for history.

Peter Guardino

Professor and Department Chair

 

For more information, visit these links:
Contact Us
Positions Available
Giving to the Department

IU Bloomington Campus and Community

Campus Tour
Campus History
Visiting IU Bloomington