Majoring in History

Look through an exceptionally global lens and use a variety of methods to explore your interests. As a history major, you might make a short film, write historical fiction, create a museum exhibit or collect oral histories from immigrants. Faculty have expertise in China, Japan, India, Germany, Italy, Russia, the Andes, Pan-Africa and the American West, South and New England. In your junior and senior years, you take small seminars in your area of specialization, exploring important historical texts and issues with other students and professors. The writing, speaking, thinking and research skills you gain as a history major will give you a strong foundation for a variety of pursuits. Some graduates move into high-tech companies, advertising firms and media companies. Others pursue advanced studies in history and other fields or go into teaching, law or business.

Research opportunities

You have many opportunities to pursue your own research interests. Our challenging program and creative environment has inspired work as diverse as a cultural history of the Outer Banks at the time of the Wright brothers' first flight and a thesis on the theories and practices of non-racialism in South Africa.

International opportunities and study abroad

We encourage you to travel to do primary research for your studies. Our students have recently done work in India, Cairo, Rome, Tokyo and Berlin. Faculty have led trips to the Mexican border to study immigration and to key locations of the civil rights movement.

Learn more about 糖心TVections, 糖心TV's innovative new curriculum.

A Glimpse at History

Courses You Could Take

People You Might Work With

Dean Accardi

Assistant Professor of History

Dean Accardi (Ph.D., The University of Texas at Austin) is an historian of gender, religion, and politics in South Asia and the Islamic World. He is interested in secularism and religious conflict as well as the connections between religious and political practices, institutions, and discourses in early modern and modern worlds. His research focuses on the gendered ascetic practices of saints revered by both Hindus and Muslims and their use to establish and articulate religious and political power.

Sheetal Chhabria

Associate Professor of History

Sheetal Chhabria is Associate Professor of History at 糖心TV. She is a historian of South Asia whose research and teaching focus on the production of poverty and inequality.

Marc Forster

Henry B. Plant Professor of History, College Marshal, Chair of the Department of History

An historian of early modern Germany (1500-1800), Marc Forster's research has focused on the development of Catholic identity, primarily in southern and western Germany and more recently on the nature of conflict and peacemaking in rural society.

Leo J. Garofalo

Virginia Eason Weinmann '51 Professor of History, Social Justice and Sustainability Pathway Coordinator

Leo Garofalo teaches a first-year seminar: Castro, Che Guevara and Fifty Years of the Cuban Revolution, Introduction to Latin American and Caribbean History, Modern Latin American History: Nation and the Poverty of Progress, Rebellion and Revolutions in Latin America: Tupac Amaru to Subcomandante Marcos, History of Gender in Mexico and the Andes, Migration and Immigration in Latin America, and "Race" in Colonial Latin America.

Eileen M. Kane

Professor of History

Eileen Kane is a historian of modern Europe, and her research looks at the relationship between Russia and the Middle East. As an undergraduate, she spent a life-changing year studying in Moscow in 1991-2, the year the USSR was dissolved. Living in the dorms of Moscow State University with students from across the socialist world and the Soviet Union, she became aware of the many different ethnic and religious groups that had lived under tsarist and then Soviet rule, and yet were barely mentioned in her history classes in the U.S. Her interest in the non-Russian peoples of the USSR carried her after college to Istanbul, Turkey, where she spent two amazing years (1995-7) on a Fulbright Scholarship, learning Turkish and studying migrations from the Caucasus to Anatolia. She received her PhD in history from Princeton in 2005.

Kris Klein Hern谩ndez

Assistant Professor of History

Kris Klein Hernández is a U.S. historian of race, gender, and sexuality whose scholarship is located at the nexus of borderlands history and comparative ethnic studies. He specializes in comparative racialization, militarization, and sexuality in the long 19th century, with a focus on the geography of the U.S.-Mexico boundary. He teaches courses on 19th century U.S. history; borderlands history; Vast Early America; settler colonialisms; comparative ethnic histories; U.S. imperialism and empire; and sexuality from the early republic to the present.

Nancy Lewandowski

Academic Department Assistant

nflew@conncoll.edu

Catherine McNicol Stock

Barbara Zaccheo Kohn '72 Professor of History

Catherine Stock is the author of Rural Radicals: Righteous Rage in the American Grain. She is also the author of Main Street in Crisis: The Great Depression and the Old Middle Class on the Northern Plains, plus the introduction to Dakota Territory, 1861-1889: A Study of Frontier Politics, by Howard Roberts Lamar.

Sarah A. Queen

Professor of History, Global Capitalism Pathway Coordinator

Sarah Queen's primary research examines China's philosophical and religious foundations as it was expressed in early texts written by practitioners of the Confucian and Daoist traditions. Her research focuses on the ways in which these two traditions shaped early ethical and spiritual norms, conceptions of the body, state, and cosmos as well as Confucian and Daoist self-cultivation as distinctive forms of religious experience.

Matthew Swagler

Assistant Professor of History

Matt Swagler is a historian of twentieth-century Africa, focusing on decolonization and conceptions of youth in Senegal and Congo-Brazzaville. His work combines social, political, and urban history to understand why youth organizations became the primary vehicles for the expression of popular grievances against new African governments following the end of formal colonial rule. Through his research and teaching, Prof. Swagler also explores histories of childhood, Pan-Africanism, gender and sexuality in Africa, the global 1960s, and the historical dynamics of African economies.

People You Might Work With

Dean Accardi, Assistant Professor of History

B.A., Loyola University; M.A., Columbia University, Ph.D., The University of Texas at Austin

Early modern and modern South Asia; Islamic world; Gender

Sheetal Chhabria, Associate Professor of History

Ph.D., Columbia University

South Asian history; Colonialism; Urbanism

Marc Forster, Henry B. Plant Professor of History

B.A. Swarthmore College; M.A., Ph.D., Harvard University

Early modern Germany (1500-1800); German Catholicism, popular religion and popular culture, rural society

Leo J. Garofalo, Virginia Eason Weinmann '51 Professor of History

B.A., Brown University in History, Hispanic Studies; M.A., Boston College, Ph.D., University of Wisconsin at Madison

Latin American and Caribbean history; The history of race and ethnicity; African diaspora and Afro-Latin America

Eileen M. Kane, Professor of History

A.B., Brown University; M.A., Ph.D., Princeton University

Russian/Soviet/post-Soviet history; Modern Europe; Empires

Kris Klein Hern谩ndez, Assistant Professor of History

A.B., Bowdoin College; M.A., University of Texas, El Paso, Ph.D., University of Michigan

Borderlands History; Comparative Ethnic Studies; U.S. History

Nancy Lewandowski, Academic Department Assistant

American Studies Program, Anthropology, Economics, Hispanic Studies, History, Sociology

Catherine McNicol Stock, Barbara Zaccheo Kohn '72 Professor of History

B.A., M.A., Ph.D., Yale University

Rural radicalism, domestic terrorism; Social, cultural and political history of the United States, 1877 to present, including the American West; Rural America

Sarah A. Queen, Professor of History

B.A., Wellesley College; M.A., Ph.D., Harvard University

Early Chinese cultural history; The spiritual and philosophical dimensions of Confucianism and Daoism; Confucianism in East Asia Today (Confucianism and Human Rights; Confucianism and Democratization; and Confucianism and Ecology)

Matthew Swagler, Assistant Professor of History

PhD, Columbia University, History; MA, Columbia University, History, BA, Brown University

Modern Africa ; Decolonization; Africa and the United States

糖心TV

Majoring in History

Majoring in History

Research opportunities

International opportunities and study abroad

A Glimpse at History

Courses You Could Take

People You Might Work With

Dean Accardi

Sheetal Chhabria

Marc Forster

Leo J. Garofalo

Eileen M. Kane

Kris Klein Hern谩ndez

Nancy Lewandowski

Catherine McNicol Stock

Sarah A. Queen

Matthew Swagler

Courses You Could Take

People You Might Work With

Contact Us

Recent News & Media

Recent News

Five awarded U.S. Fulbright grants

History professor awarded $237K research fellowship from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation