Welcome to the UK Department of History.

We are a community working together to excel in teaching, scholarship, and community service. The department is home to 31 faculty and 3 staff members. During the 2007-2008 academic year, we had 332 undergraduate majors, 47 students in the M.A. and 45 students in the Ph.D. programs. During the same period, 6 students defended their dissertations and received their Ph.D.s, 8 students passed their qualifying exams, and 10 students were awarded their Master’s in History. Our graduate students have gone on to teach in universities and colleges throughout the United States. 

Our faculty have been awarded fellowships by the most prominent foundations and government-granting agencies: for example, the National Endowment for the Humanities,  the National Humanities Center, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and the American Council of Learned Societies.  Scholars investigate political, diplomatic, economic, social, cultural, intellectual, religious, and legal history, and the history of science and medicine. Our research spans the globe from Appalachia to Mexico, from Macao to Germany, from Lexington to Moscow. The numerous prizes for books and articles that faculty have been awarded attest to the high quality of their scholarship.  History Department professors have won every teaching award available at the University of Kentucky and have been honored as invited teachers at some of world’s most prestigious institutions such as the Collège de France and Princeton University.

At present, we are very excited about the recent restructuring of our graduate program, which positions us in the forefront of changes taking place throughout the academic world.  Building on the department’s strengths, colleagues have created five new fields of concentration, which will foster collaboration among faculty and graduate students not only across chronological periods but also cultural and geographical borders. They are: Pre-Modern and Early Modern History, Women’s and Gender History, Culture, Ideas, and Society, The Making and Unmaking of Empires, and Religions and History. Each semester one of the fields will hold a symposium with invited speakers (see fields of concentration under the Graduate Program for more information). 

Thank you for visiting our website. We hope it will spark your interest in the exciting research and teaching offered by the Department of History. 

Francie Chassen-Lopez
Chair, Department of History