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New Global History Program
The Tufts University Department of History launched a new Global History Ph.D. program in 2006. History professor Felipe Fernández-Armesto, who helped create the program, shared his thoughts on it via e-mail with Robert Bochnak, G07, of the Office of Graduate Studies.
Robert Bochnak: Why did the history department develop this new program?
Professor Felipe Fernández-Armesto: Global history—the branch of historical scholarship that treats the world as a whole, transcending national and regional approaches, and emphasizing global or long-range connections and comparisons—is the big growth area of our discipline. It encompasses the planet, transgresses traditional boundaries, crosses disciplines, heals fragmentation, and helps to make a globalizing world intelligible. 300,000 undergraduates a year in the United States now do what are, by name or in effect, attempts at global history courses.
From the point of view of the department, this program is part of a dynamic strategy which includes projecting and developing our strength as a globally-oriented department, a strength unique for a department of our size. With this program in place, the history department will be able to do more to reflect new trends and pursue new opportunities for Tufts.
RB:
Can you tell me how, as your department's website states, this program will provide "a framework for the exchange of ideas and knowledge?"
FFA: If you're on this planet, you're into global history. Everything we do in our special fields, as professors, graduate researchers, and undergraduate learners keys into global history and is informed and framed by it. Whatever you do, you see the subject more clearly if you make the comparisons, draw the connections. Global history gives our work a shared focus and our department a common life. The teaching program, which is organized as a series of interlinked 'kernels', which encompass the Tufts curriculum in many disciplines and fields, institutionalizes these merits, as does the Global History Seminar, which I think everyone who has taken part in it acknowledges as one of the most exciting new intellectual initiatives at Tufts. It's a new and distinctive kind of seminar, which brings a lot of visitors to campus as speakers and audience. The atmosphere is unique. There are no papers. Speakers on the cutting edge of the discipline share their thoughts about their current and future work.
RB:
How will the global history program benefit the graduate students in it?
FFA: It will make them better scholars, better historians, better citizens, more globally minded, and more connected to their peers and professors. It will also, to quote a great sage, ‘lead to positions of considerable emolument'. We're getting lots of inquiries from prospective students, which reflects the state of the job market. This is the program to join for graduates who want to be well-equipped to teach history at universities.
To find out more about the Global History Ph.D. program go to http://ase.tufts.edu/history/graduate/PhD.asp or call 617-627-2783.
