Graduate Program

The history departments at three Triangle Area universities – Duke University in Durham, North Carolina State University in Raleigh, and The University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill – have established a Program in Intellectual History for students pursuing the MA and Ph.D. in Modern European, Russian, or American History.  Within easy access of each other, these universities now form a major national center for graduate teaching and research in the humanities and social sciences. The Program is designed to take advantage of their unique concentration of resources:

• An unusually large community of scholars engaged in teaching and research in modern European and American intellectual history
• Three outstanding history departments, representing the entire spectrum of current historical scholarship
• Excellent library resources for graduate research in intellectual history
• The National Humanities Center, which brings approximately thirty-five visiting scholars to the Triangle Area each year, and which has hosted an Intellectual History Seminar since the spring of 1995

The uniqueness of our program lies in both its thematic inclusiveness and its methodological orientation.  The faculty is committed to a contextual approach to intellectual history.  Context is broadly defined, but we believe that intellectual historians make their distinctive contribution to knowledge when they study texts to recover the historical meanings of ideas.  To that end we seek to understand how ideas were formed, reformulated, argued, and received in specific historical contexts.  We also wish to develop a closer relationship between European and American intellectual history – one that will enrich both areas.  Hence we encourage research that draws comparative conclusions about thinkers and ideas on both sides of the Atlantic, and that explores transactions and mediations between American and European intellectual discourses.

Students develop plans of study involving intellectual historians from all three universities.  Thanks to the diversity of faculty, students can explore a wide variety of themes, combining intellectual history with cognate fields in history and other disciplines.  They can apply concepts and insights from feminist theory, literary and cultural theory, psychoanalytic theory, studies of the construction of national and ethnic identity, the history of science, the history of philosophy, political theory, and social theory.