Overview
The Department of History is one of the largest and most respected units in UC Berkeley's College of Letters and Science. The Department's faculty ranges across virtually all of the major geographical and chronological fields recognized by the discipline. Berkeley has long been proud of its extensive engagement with the history of Asia, a part of the world only recently given its due by many other history departments. While developing ambitious programs in the study of East Asian, South Asian, Southeast Asian, and Middle Eastern history, UC Berkeley has also maintained and increased its reputation in the several fields in which it first attained distinction in the first half of the 20th century: Ancient, Medieval, Early Modern, and Modern European, Latin American, and United States history. Many faculty members are also doing pioneering work in transnational, international, and global approaches to historical scholarship. The Department is comprehensive also in the thematic and methodological emphases that render the study of history one of the most capacious of all academic callings. Although in recent years the Department's strengths in cultural, intellectual, and political history have been the most widely noted, the Department's distinction in social, economic, international and other kinds of history is also recognized throughout the world.
Professional assessments of the nation's history departments (e.g., those sponsored by the National Research Council) usually rank Berkeley first, second, or third. The intellectual stature of the Department's faculty is registered in many metrics, including the fact that seventeen regular or emeriti members have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In addition, individual members of the Department have often carried major responsibility within the Campus's administration. The Department also enjoys a reputation for excellence in both undergraduate and graduate teaching. Many of its members have won major teaching awards in recent years. Our students, both undergraduate and graduate students, have been highly successful in winning university and external prizes and fellowships to support their innovative research. The Department's baccalaureate and doctoral alumni have gone on to a variety of successful careers in fields such as research, education, law, business, non-profits and NGOs, journalism, public affairs, diplomacy, and international relations.
Undergraduate Programs
History: BA, Minor
Graduate Program
History: PhD
Faculty and Instructors
+ Indicates this faculty member is the recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award.
Faculty
Diliana Angelova, Associate Professor. Early Christian and Byzantine Art, women, gender, material culture, history of ideas, late antique art, the Virgin Mary, early Christian empresses, imperial iconography, power and material culture, the empress Helena, the relic of the True Cross, urban development of Constantinople, textiles, ivories, mythology in Byzantine art, myth and genre in Archaic and Classical Greek art, and romantic love in ancient and medieval art .
Research Profile
Stephan H. Astourian, Associate Adjunct Professor. Armenia, Caucasus, Azerbaijan, Modern Turkey, Diasporas .
Research Profile
Janaki Bakhle, Associate Professor. Intellectual history of religion, politics and modern India, South Asia.
Research Profile
Andrew E. Barshay, Professor. Social thought, modernism, social sciences in modern Japan, marxism, Japanese history, Japanese-Russian relations.
Research Profile
Mark Brilliant, Associate Professor. 20th century US history, with a focus on political economy, civil rights, education, law, and the west.
Research Profile
Cathryn Carson, Professor. History of physics, science and society, history of universities, German history, intellectual history, ethnography, data science, nuclear waste.
Research Profile
Margaret Chowning, Professor. Mexico, history, gender, women, Latin America.
Research Profile
John Connelly, Professor. Modern East and Central European political and social history, comparative education, history of nationalism and racism, history of Catholicism, Late Modern Europe.
Research Profile
Thomas Dandelet, Professor. Renaissance Italy and Europe, Spanish Empire, early modern Mediterranean.
Research Profile
Brian DeLay, Associate Professor. US, the Americas, International History, nineteenth century, Native American history, American West, Borderlands.
Research Profile
Nicholas Dirks, Professor. History and anthropology of South Asia, social and cultural theory, history of imperialism, historiography, cultural studies, globalization.
Research Profile
Sandra Eder, Assistant Professor. Gender, sexuality, medicine, science, US History 20th century, popular culture.
Research Profile
John M. Efron, Professor. Cultural and social history of German Jewry.
Research Profile
Susanna Elm, Professor. History of the Later Roman Empire, pagan - Christian interactions, ancient medicine, slavery and the evolution of Christianity, leadership and empire, reception of antiquity.
Research Profile
Victoria Frede-Montemayor, Associate Professor. Enlightenment, Russian intellectual history, sentimentalism, eighteenth and nineteenth century, anti-religious thought, romanticism, history of friendship.
Research Profile
Bruce Hall, Associate Professor. Africa.
Research Profile
David Henkin, Professor. History, US History, urban history, cultural history, History of Time.
Research Profile
Rebecca Herman, Assistant Professor. Latin American history in a global context.
Research Profile
Carla Hesse, Professor. France, modern Europe, history of women.
Research Profile
Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, Associate Professor. Modern German and European History, Conceptual History, Transnational History, urban studies.
Research Profile
Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, Associate Professor. U S women’s history and African-American history.
Research Profile
Abhishek Kaicker, Assistant Professor. South Asia, Mughal, early modern, cities, history, Persian.
Research Profile
Tabitha Kanogo, Professor. Colonialism, nationalism, women and gender, childhood and youth.
Research Profile
Ethan Katz, Associate Professor. Jewish history, modern France, empire, Jewish-Muslim relations, secularism.
Research Profile
Geoffrey Koziol, Professor. Medieval history, History of Medieval Christianity, Medieval Political Institutions.
Research Profile
Emily Mackil, Associate Professor. Ancient Greek history.
Research Profile
Waldo E. Martin, Professor. African American History , Modern American Culture.
Research Profile
Maria Mavroudi, Professor. Byzantine studies.
Research Profile
Massimo Mazzotti, Professor. History of science, History of Mathematics, social theory, science and society, STS .
Research Profile
Rebecca McLennan, Associate Professor. North America: 1763-present, law and society, crime and punishment, prisons, society and culture, capitalism, global foodways .
Research Profile
Maureen Miller, Professor. Medieval history.
Research Profile
+ Carlos F. Norena, Associate Professor. Roman history.
Research Profile
Michael Nylan, Professor. Gender, history, East Asian studies, early China, the fifth century BC to the fifth century AD, with an emphasis on the sociopolitical context, aesthetic theories and material culture, belief.
Research Profile
Vanessa Ogle, Associate Professor. Late Modern Europe, Western Europe.
Research Profile
Dylan Penningroth, Professor. African American history and in U S socio-legal history.
Research Profile
Christine Philliou, Associate Professor. Middle East, Ottoman Empire political and social history, Turkey and Greece as parts of the post-Ottoman world.
Research Profile
Isabel Richter, Assistant Adjunct Professor. Modern German history (18th – 20th centuries), yransnational youth cultures in the 20th century, history of death in modern Europe, cultural anthropology, material and visual history in the 19th and 20th centuries, national socialism, gender history and interdisciplinary gender studies.
Research Profile
Caitlin C. Rosenthal, Assistant Professor. American history, capitalism, economic history, slavery.
Research Profile
Daniel Sargent, Associate Professor. American history, International History, Contemporary History.
Research Profile
Elena A. Schneider, Associate Professor. Cuba and the Caribbean, colonial Latin America, The Atlantic World, 1400-1888.
Research Profile
+ Ethan H. Shagan, Professor. British history, early modern European history, history of religion.
Research Profile
Jonathan Sheehan, Professor. Religion, Christianity, Europe, secularism, Secularization.
Research Profile
Ronit Stahl, Assistant Professor. Modern America.
Research Profile
Nicolas Tackett, Associate Professor. Ethnicity, elites, China, cities, national identity, social networks, medieval history, death ritual, Tang Dynasty, Song Dynasty, Liao Dynasty.
Research Profile
James Vernon, Professor. Britain, its Empire and World, 1750 to present.
Research Profile
Wen-Hsin Yeh, Professor. History, East Asian studies, Qing and Modern China.
Research Profile
Peter B. Zinoman, Professor. Vietnam, Vietnam War, Vietnamese literature, Southeast Asian history, communism, nationalism, colonialism.
Research Profile
Lecturers
Christoph Hermann, Lecturer.
Elizabeth Schwall, Lecturer.
Jennifer Terry, Lecturer.
Joseph Kellner, Lecturer.
Margo Boenig-Lipstin, Lecturer.
Andrej Milivojevic, Lecturer.
David Wetzel, Lecturer.
Emeritus Faculty
Richard M. Abrams, Professor Emeritus. Politics, recent US history: business foreign relations, etc .
Research Profile
Anthony Adamthwaite, Professor Emeritus.
Margaret Lavinia Anderson, Professor Emeritus. Germany 1860-1945, Kulturkampf, the Center Party (Zentrum), 19th century European Catholicism, the 19th century European Religious Revival, Democratisation more generally and comparatively, comparative elections and electoral politics, European (and esp German) Relations with the late Ottoman Empire, Armenian Genocide.
Research Profile
Robert M. Berdahl, Professor Emeritus.
Mary Elizabeth Berry, Professor Emeritus. Late medieval and early modern Japan.
Research Profile
Thomas A. Brady, Professor Emeritus.
Richard Candida Smith, Professor Emeritus. Identity, memory, narrative, 19th and 20th century US cultural and intellectual history, cultural interaction and exchange with France and Latin America, oral history and personal testimony as historical sources.
Research Profile
Jan De Vries, Professor. Economics, demography, history.
Research Profile
+ Robin L. Einhorn, Professor Emeritus. Taxation, United States political history, urban history, nineteenth century.
Research Profile
Paula S. Fass, Professor Emeritus. History of childhood, social and cultural history of the United States, immigration and ethnicity, history of education, child abduction.
Research Profile
+ Erich S. Gruen, Professor Emeritus. Classics, Greek and Roman history, Jews in the Greco-Roman world.
Research Profile
Samuel Haber, Professor Emeritus.
John L. Heilbron, Professor Emeritus. History of the physical sciences, biography.
Research Profile
Richard Herr, Professor Emeritus.
David Hollinger, Professor Emeritus. US history.
Research Profile
Eugene F. Irschick, Professor Emeritus.
David G. Johnson, Professor Emeritus. History, East Asian studies, city-god cults of T'ang and Sung China, ritual and sculpture in Chinese religion.
Research Profile
Kerwin L. Klein, Professor Emeritus.
Ira M. Lapidus, Professor Emeritus.
John Lesch, Professor Emeritus.
Linda Lewin, Professor Emeritus. Race, social history of 19th andamp,amp, 20th century Brazil--family andamp,amp, kinship, illegitimacy andamp,amp, inheritance rights, banditry (emergence of cangaco), slavery, andamp,amp, color, oral poetic tradition in NE region (repentistas, desafio), cotton production in 19th-century NE Brazil.
Research Profile
+ Leon F. Litwack, Professor Emeritus.
Thomas R. Metcalf, Professor Emeritus.
+ Robert L. Middlekauff, Professor Emeritus.
Sheldon Rothblatt, Professor Emeritus.
Mary P. Ryan, Professor Emeritus.
Peter Sahlins, Professor Emeritus. Early modern France, animal-human relations, immigration, citizenship and nationality in pre-modern Europe .
Research Profile
Irwin Scheiner, Professor Emeritus.
Charles G. Sellers, Professor Emeritus.
Yuri Slezkine, Professor. Russia, Late Modern Europe.
Research Profile
John M. Smith, Professor Emeritus.
Randolph R. Starn, Professor Emeritus.
William B. Taylor, Professor Emeritus.
Contact Information
Department of History
3229 Dwinelle Hall
Phone: 510-642-1971
Fax: 510-643-5323
Graduate Student Affairs Officer
Todd Kuebler
3310 Dwinelle Hall
Phone: 510-642-2034
Student Services Coordinator
Anne Meyers
3313 Dwinelle Hall
Phone: 510-643-8995