School of Historical Studies

The School of Historical Studies is a dynamic community of faculty members and graduate students. The School pursues an open-ended yet rigorous, scientific enquiry into fundamental questions that concern the historical imagination. The School is dedicated to reframing and rethinking the interconnections between time, memory, and history in Asian and non-Asian contexts.

Faculty in the School of Historical Studies understand historical studies to encompass all questions critical to human understanding. These questions include how humans make or made sense of the past, how historical understanding of the past can transform the present and the various ways in which the present is constituted or constructed by the past.

Faculty members combine a rich variety of methodologies and disciplinary backgrounds to bear on their research and teaching of history including anthropology, sociology, archaeology, religious studies, philosophy, economic history, political science, philology, visual studies, and art history.

Students in the School develop critical understandings of global histories, cultural-political histories, economic histories, intellectual histories, oral and visual histories, art histories, and religious histories.

The School of Historical Studies is committed to undertaking and fostering research that begins with the categories and concepts of historical agents and critically engages with putative, universal categories of human experience.