Welcome to the Graduate Program in History!
The graduate program in History at USC offers a rigorous course of study that balances depth in particular fields with a broad, transnational, and interdisciplinary perspective. We train our students in historical methods, research, critical analysis of written and visual sources, historical writing, and historical pedagogy through intensive reading courses, seminars, and tutorials. This training culminates in the PhD dissertation, a significant scholarly and historiographical contribution to the study of a field.
The program’s relatively small size facilitates close working relationships between students and faculty and encourages collaboration between students working in diverse areas. It also allows for flexibility, permitting students to form their own specializations across or between traditional field boundaries. Our students also take advantage of the unique opportunities around Los Angeles provided by such leading cultural institutions as the Huntington Library, the Getty Center, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Wende Museum, and the Pacific Asia Museum.
Students benefit from the extraordinary resources around USC, including, for example, the Cinema Arts Library, the Warner Bros. Archives, the USC Libraries Special Collections, the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives and the Feuchtwanger Memorial Library at the USC Libraries, and the Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, which houses the video testimonies of 52,000 Holocaust survivors. The Department of History’s intellectual life is further enriched by its close relationship with many vibrant research institutes and centers on campus (listed below), which provide additional opportunities for research, funding and professionalization.