The History Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago offers a serious and successful undergraduate and graduate program. At any one time, about 250 undergraduate majors and 100 graduate students are enrolled and working toward degrees. To teach and train them, there are thirty-eight members of the faculty whose resumes you can examine elsewhere on this site. As you will discover, their expertise and the courses they teach cover most of traditional areas of historical investigation, including the history of Europe, the United States, Latin America, Africa, East Asia, and the Middle East. The Department is also particularly strong in gender and women’s history, American and comparative labor and economic/business history, African and African-American history, and urban history. This strength is reflected in our graduate concentration in the History of Work, Race, and Gender in the Urban World (WRGUW). The University of Illinois at Chicago is an ambitious institution that has already attained Research One status (one of the 88 universities with $40 million of Federal funding per year

The Faculty. In addition to a regular output of articles in refereed journals and books with the best university presses, the faculty has an enviable record in obtaining fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation as well as the Woodrow Wilson Center, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council. The Department’s faculty are a vigorous and productive group of historians. What's more, many have won teaching awards in the University.

New Faculty.

The History Department is fortunate to have been joined by many new faculty members in the in past few years:

  • Dr. Kevin M. Schultz received his BA (cum laude with high honors in history) from Vanderbilt University in 1997 and his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 2005. From 2005 to 2007 he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for the Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. While at Berkeley he was named Dean’s Fellow in 2004-05 and was a Jacob K. Javits Fellow from 2000-04.
    Kevin Schultz is the author of two books in press, Exploring America’s Past: A U.S. History Primer (Belmont, CA: Thomson/Wadsworth Learning, forthcoming, December 2007), a college level textbook, and Making Pluralism: Catholics and Jews in Postwar America (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2008), a monograph based on his dissertation. Making Pluralism is a reinterpretation of what are often thought of as the assimilationist 1950s.  The book shows that postwar Catholics and Jews consciously crafted a language of diversity and advocated the importance of a neutral state, thus setting the terms for discussions of American multiculturalism. Dr. Schultz has published an important refereed article, “Religion as Identity in Postwar America: The Story of the Last Serious Attempt to Put a Question on Religion in the U.S. Census,” Journal of American History (September 2006), pp. 359-84 (highlighted as a “notable article” in The Wilson Quarterly [Winter 2007], pp. 82-83) and has two articles accepted for publication in American Quarterly and Labor History.

  • Rama Mantena received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 2002 with a specialization in the history of South Asia and colonial India. During her graduate studies her studies were supported by grants from the Social Science Research Council, by a Mellon Pre-Doctoral Fellowship Award, by a Rackham Dissertation Grant from the University of Michigan, and by grants from the American Institute of Indian Studies. From 2002 to 2004 Rama Mantena was a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Smith College. Since then Rama Mantena has held two postdoctoral awards at prestigious institutions. She was a Carol G. Lederer Postdoctoral Fellow at the Pembroke Center at Brown University from 2004-2005. In 2005-06 she was a Kluge Fellow at the John W. Kluge Center for Research at the Library of Congress.
    Rama is currently working on a book manuscript, “Estranged Pasts: Archive and Historical Time in India.” Rama has published 5 book reviews and a refereed article, “Vernacular Futures: Colonial Philology and the Idea of History in Nineteenth Century South India,” Indian Economic and Social History Review, 42: 4 (2005). She has presented more than a dozen papers at scholarly conferences, including the Association for Asian Studies and the annual conferences on South Asia at the University of Wisconsin. Last spring she chaired a roundtable on “Textures of Time: Writing History in South India, 1600-1800” at the annual conference of the Association for Asian Studies.
  • Malgorzata Fidelis received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2005 with a specialization in the history of Eastern Europe and Poland. As an undergraduate at the University of California-Davis, “Gosia” (as she prefers to be called) received the Dobb’s Prize for the best senior history thesis of the year in 1998. While in graduate school at Stanford her research in Poland was supported by the Anatole G. and Josephine L. Mazour Fund at Stanford and by a Mellon Dissertation Fellowship. In 2004 Gosia Fidelis received a prize for the best undergraduate seminar designed and taught by a graduate student for her seminar on “Women and Communism in Eastern Europe and Russia.”Dr. Fidelis’ research focuses on labor and gender in post World War II Poland through a study of the “new proletarians,” women who worked in the textile and coal mining industries. She has published two articles in refereed journals, one on “Equality through Protection: The Politics of Women’s Employment in Postwar Poland” in the Slavic Review and the second on Polish women intellectuals in the cultural construction of gender roles in Poland in the nineteenth century in the Journal of Women’s History.

  • Corey Capers will join the History Department at UIC in Spring 2006. He received his BA from Southern Methodist University and his Ph.D. in December 2004 from University of California at Santa Cruz in the History of Consciousness Program. He currently holds a Cornell University Provost's Academic Diversity Post-Doctoral Fellowship and has delivered six papers at national conferences. He has taught as a visiting assistant professor at Cornell and as an adjunct professor at California State Monterey Bay. He has an article under consideration at the Journal of the Early Republic, one of the leading journals in his field. Capers' dissertation, entitled "Black Voices/White Print: Race, Satire, and the Rhetoric of Disorder in the Early Republic, 1793-1830," is a cultural and intellectual history of the role of print media and popular political rhetoric. He uses pamphlets, broadsides, black orators, public festivals, as well as burlesque and comedy to explore ideas about social order and disorder. His work looks at the development of the "public sphere" in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century America and at the creation of a new national identity and argues that images and ideas about race were central to both of those processes.

  • Jennifer Brier arrived at UIC in August 2003 from Hunter College; she received her Ph.D. from the History Department at Rutgers University. A specialist in lesbian and gay history and the history of sexuality, she is completing a book on the history of modern AIDS activism. Among her publications are "AIDS and People with AIDS" and "AIDS Service Organizations," in Marc Stein, ed., Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered History in America (Charles Scribner's Sons, 2004) and "The Immigrant Infection: Images of Race, Nation and Contagion in Public Debates on AIDS and Immigration," in Allida M. Black, ed., Modern American Queer History (Temple University Press, 2001). She is a joint appointment with the Gender and Women's Studies Program.

  • Robert Johnston, who joined us in 2003 from Yale University, received his Ph.D. from the Department of History at Rutgers University. He is the author of the award-winning The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon (Princeton University Press, 2003) and The Making of America: The History of the United States from 1492 to the Present (National Geographic Society, 2002) and editor of The Politics of Healing: Essays in the Twentieth-Century History of North American Alternative Medicine (Routledge, 2004), and co-editor of two volumes, The Middling Sorts: Explorations in the History of the American Middle Class (Routledge, 2001) and The Countryside in the Age of the Modern State: Political Histories of Rural America (Cornell University Press, 2001). He is the author of numerous articles and book chapters. He now directs our Teacher Education Program and teach courses in teaching methods and 20th century American history.

  • Brian Hosmer, who joined us from the University of Wyoming (where he was chair of the Department of History), received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Texas at Austin in 1993. He is the author of American Indians in the Marketplace: Persistence and Innovation Among the Menominees and Metlakatlans, 1870-1920 (University Press of Kansas, 1999) and co-editor of Native Pathways: Economic Development and American Indian Culture in the Twentieth Century (University Press of Colorado, forthcoming). In addition to teaching in the UIC History Department, he directs the D'Arcy McNickle Center at the Newberry Library.
  • Christopher R. Boyer joined the UIC History faculty in August 2001 from the Academy for International & Area Studies at Harvard University, where he held a two-year post-doctoral fellow. Professor Boyer received his Ph.D. in 1997 from the University of Chicago and was assistant professor at Kansas State University from 1997 to 2001. He is the author of Becoming Campesinos: Agrarian Mobilization and Postrevolutionary Ideology in Michoacan, Mexico ( Stanford University Press, 2003). Among his many articles are "The Threads of Class at La Virgen: Misrepresentation and Identity at a Mexican Textile Mill, 1918-1935," American History Review 105 (December 2000); "Old Loves, New Loyalties: Agrarismo in Michoacan, 1920-1928," Hispanic American Historical Review 78 (August 1998); and "Conservation by Fiat: Mexican Forests and the Politics of Logging Bans, 1926-1973," in The Environment of Great Mexico: History, Culture, Economy, Politics (forthcoming, Duke University Press). He teaches modern Mexican history and environmental history at UIC, where he holds a joint appointment in the History Department and the Latin American Studies Program. He is currently Director of Graduate Studies in the History Department.

  • Javier Villa-Flores comes to UIC as our colonial Mexican historian, holding a joint position as assistant professor in the History Department and the Latin American Studies Program. He is completing a book on "Defending God's Honor: Blasphemy and the Social Construction of Reverence in New Spain, 1520-1700." He is also the author of Carlo Ginzburg, el historiador como teorico (Universidad de Guadalajara, 1995); "'Talking Through the Chest': Divination and Ventriloquism among Afro-Mexican Slave Women in Seventeenth-Century New Spain," Colonial Latin American Review (forthcoming 2005); "On Divine Persecution: Blasphemy and Gambling in New Spain," in Susan Schroeder and Stafford Poole , eds. Religion and Society in Colonial Mexico (New Mexico University Press, in press, 2004), and "To Lose One's Soul: Blasphemy and Slavery in New Spain, 196-1669, " The Hispanic American Historical Review 82 (August 2002). He has taught at the Univesity of Guadalajara.

In addition, five new faculty members joined us in AY 2000-2001:

  • Elspeth Carruthers, Assistant Professor (Ph.D., Princeton University, 1999), medieval history
  • Susan Levine, Professor (Ph.D., City University of New York, 1980), American women’s, labor, and policy history
  • Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Assistant Professor (Ph.D., Cambridge, 1990), Modern British political, economic, and women’s history
  • Leon Fink, Professor (Ph.D., University of Rochester, 1977), U.S. and comparative labor history, Progressive era
  • Deirdre McCloskey, Professor (Ph.D., Harvard University, 1970), European and comparative economic history
Chicago as a Place to Live and Study. One of the major cities of the world, Chicago is a marvelous place to be a student. The University is a stone's throw from the center of the city, located on a campus that has most of the features-lawns and trees and open spaces--of universities set in more rural areas. The city offers great music, theater and art galleries as well as a beautiful lakefront and magnificent architecture. Two other major universities are located here as well as several other significant ones, while the Newberry Library, the Chicago Historical Society, and the Great Lakes branch of the National Archives are among the archival repositories that add to the possibilities for research in Chicago. Finally, the library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) has one of the biggest holdings among American universities, to which UIC students and faculty have direct access by computer, along with full borrowing privileges with guaranteed delivery of items requested within two days.

The Undergraduate Experience.The undergraduate degrees we offer are the B.A. and the Bachelor of Arts in Teaching. B.A. majors are required to take courses in the three geographic areas of historical study-European, American, the rest of the world-and these must be at the upper (300- and 400-levels) as well as the lower division. Throughout their career, they will be taught in relatively small courses-rarely more than 100 at the lower levels and usually as small as 8 to 30 at the 300 and 400-level. Moreover, the full-time faculty teaches not only the advanced and specialized courses, but the 100-level ones as well. In addition, our advising system is very thorough and involved, and all majors can get advice and attention very easily. Consequently, History majors enjoy a small-school experience in a large, urban, research university. The experience of the B.A.T. students is very similar. In addition to meeting the same kind of requirements as B.A. majors, there are some special courses they have to take, including World History and Teaching Social Studies, meeting various state certification stipulations, and a semester of teaching practice in a high school. And, of course, this means that advising and supervision are even more necessary and available, while the sense of being part of a program along with others in their classes is also greater.

The Graduate Experience The graduate degrees offered at UIC are the M.A., M.A.T., and Ph.D. The Master of Arts in Teaching is a rigorous and very valuable degree that is part of our highly regarded Teaching of History Program. Students take the same courses as other graduate students, including required colloquia and the research seminar. The M.A. is also available as a graduate degree separate from, and preliminary to, the Ph.D. and it enrolls able students who may not yet want to go on to the Ph.D. or who may not want to do so. Most Ph.D. students can expect to obtain financial support through teaching assistantships -- around 25 each semester -- or through university or departmental fellowships. There is careful supervision of, and close contact with, all graduate students, particularly of course the Ph.D. students. But the requirements are demanding, and they have ensured that our graduates have been well-trained and thus placed in academic or other related positions with considerable success.

Applying to the UIC History Department. You will find the information you need to apply to the graduate programs in History at UIC elsewhere on this web site. Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions at all.

James Searing, Professor and Chair

E-Mail: jsearing@uic.edu