History at the University of Missouri

Introducing the Department of History

By any measure you might choose the History Department at the University of Missouri is an outstanding one. Our faculty has compiled a distinguished record of scholarship, receiving major awards to support their research from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and many other sponsors of cutting edge scholarship. The department’s professors publish the results of their historical investigations in a wide variety of venues, both popular and scholarly. Their books have won prizes from the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians and other national and regional scholarly organizations. The History department’s teaching record is every bit as distinguished as its record of scholarly accomplishment. History faculty have won twenty-seven different teaching awards, including seven professors who have received the William T. Kemper Fellowship for Teaching Excellence, the University of Missouri’s highest teaching distinction.

Students of history will find many opportunities to have close contact with this group of award-winning scholars and teachers. History majors conclude their studies with an undergraduate seminar, in which a group of students investigate intensively a special historical topic under the direction of one of the department’s professors. The department’s graduate students work closely with professors in advanced seminars and write theses and dissertations on a wide variety of topics. The teaching opportunities the department offers graduate students prepare them well for dealing with the difficult job market for new history PhDs. Over the last ten years, University of Missouri history PhDs have found positions at more than forty different colleges and universities across the United States.

This web site provides many opportunities to get to know the department. Undergraduates can check out the schedule of courses, investigate the requirements for a history major, and look over the internships, special opportunities and scholarships available to history majors. Prospective graduate students should look at the faculty home pages to see the teaching and research interests of the individual faculty members; and the field pages for the specific areas in which the department offers a graduate program. Also available on-line are application forms and the official degree requirements.

We are also here to serve the people of Missouri and the broader online public as a source of historical expertise. Check the faculty home pages and the research fields page to contact the professors who can answer your particular questions about the past.

We are particularly pleased to welcome departmental friends and alumni to our web site. The Alumni & Friends page contains alumni news, past issues of Historically Speaking, the department’s alumni e-newsletter. Be sure to sign up for regular e-mail delivery of this newsletter, which appears three times yearly.

If you have questions or comments, we would be delighted to hear from you.

Jonathan Sperber
Chair, Department of History

department news:

PhD candidate Autumn Dolan honored by Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship

Autumn Dolan received the Best Graduate Student Paper in 2009 for her paper “A Revival of Female Spirituality: Adaptations of Nun’s Rules during the Hiberno-Frankish Monastic Movement of the Seventh Century” from the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship. The paper will be published in the journal, Medieval Feminist Forum. more >>

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Read the latest Viewed Historically, our friends and alumni newsletter (pdf).

Ian Worthington's video course released

Professor Worthington Ian Worthington, Frederick A. Middlebush Professor of History, has just completed a video course for The Teaching Company. The course The Long Shadow of the Ancient Greek World, a 48-lecture course with over 700 visual elements on 8 DVDs and CDs, was released by The Teaching Company in April 2009. The Teaching Company, founded in 1990, boasts that out of every 5,000 professors from all over America that it puts through a rigorous selection procedure it invites only one to design, write, and tape a course. Its courses are aimed at professional people and those with higher degrees, and like university-level courses must be challenging, thought-provoking, and stimulating. For more details on it and on Worthington's course, go to www.teach12.com.
Professor Worthington >>

Department welcomes newest colleague

The history department is very pleased to announce that Professor Soon Keong Ong, of the University of North Florida, will be joining it at the beginning of the academic year 2009-10, to teach East Asian and Southeast Asian history. Professor Ong, who received his Ph.D. from Cornell University, is an expert on the history of the overseas Chinese, emigrants from China who moved to different countries in Southeast Asia.

Roger E. Robinson named first Goodrich Graduate Research Assistantship.

Recent Publications:
Miller book jacket
Professor Kerby Miller
Ireland and Irish America: Culture, Class and Transatlantic Migration
Professor Miller >>

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