Graduate Studies in History at MSU
MSU’s History faculty prides itself for being at the forefront of a movement currently challenging the traditional boundaries of the historical discipline. In our teaching and writing, we recognize that new insights can be gained from trans-regional and interdisciplinary approaches to the past. We have structured our graduate program accordingly. Students enter the program as members of particular fields, but they take a wide range of courses that give them the tools they need to construct studies that reach across oceans and national borders and that apply innovative methods and theories borrowed from other disciplines. To reify our connections to one another, faculty and graduate students in African, African-American, East Asian, Latin American and Caribbean, Russian, Eastern European, Western European, and US history recently joined together to create exciting new graduate fields in Atlantic World, Comparative Black History, International Labor and Working Class History, Migration Studies, Women and Gender and World History. Further, we sponsor an ongoing History of Sport Seminar Group.
Comprised of over fifty full-time, actively publishing faculty, ours is a large and diverse department that has long been recognized for having strengths in a variety of areas. Over the past five years, we have added fifteen new members to the department. Many already have long publishing records and years of researching and teaching experience. Each has brought new energy and new ideas to the graduate program.
To help facilitate graduate study, the department offers generous, multi-year funding packages on a competitive basis. In addition, our students regularly receive competitive internal and external awards for language study, dissertation research and dissertation write-up.
Graduate students entering our program join faculty members as full participants of an active intellectual community. Like faculty, graduate students teach undergraduate students, have their own research agendas, and participate in outreach programs. Through regular course work and MSU sponsored workshops they are given opportunities to present their own research and to draft publishable papers. Moreover, like faculty, graduate students may apply for travel money to attend national and international conferences. Though demanding, the reward for such multi-faceted intellectual engagement is that, upon graduating, our students find they are well prepared for what lies ahead. For the majority of students, who aspire to a career in academics, our placement record alone bears this out. In recent years, over ninety percent of our graduate students have found employment in college and university history departments, including University of Maryland, Ohio University, UCLA, University of Kansas, and University of Pennsylvania.
An application can be completed on-line or downloaded. Both students holding/finishing BAs and students holding/finishing MAs should apply for entrance into the doctoral program. Students entering with an MA sometimes follow a faster track than students entering with a BA. On the application, specify the major field in which you would like to study. High school teachers interested in pursing an MA degree should apply to our MAII program.
Please let us hear from you.
Email: history@msu.edu
301 Morrill Hall
East Lansing, Michigan 48824
Main Office Phone: (517) 355.7500
Fax Number: (517) 353.5599
Main Office Hours: 8:00-5:00 M-F
Graduate teaching assistants at MSU are unionized. The current collective bargaining agreement between the Graduate Employee Union (GEU) and the University can be found at http://grad.msu.edu/geu/agree.pdf