Workshop in International History at Temple
Goals:
The Workshop in International History seeks to promote the exchange of ideas among scholars working on international, transnational, and global history; and to develop contacts between Temple faculty and graduate students working in this area and their peers at other leading programs in the country.
Assumptions:
“International history” is short-hand for scholarship that explores the history of international relations in the broadest sense. In our era of globalization, historians have grown ever more aware of the need for historical scholarship that draws on various methodologies and that examines inter-connections between states, peoples, and regional or global processes. Some international historians focus chiefly on state-to-state relations and warfare, and use sources generated by states, armies, and government agencies. This approach to international history has been much enriched by new work on topics such as empires and their collapse, borderlands, comparative genocide, ideological conflict, ethnicities, gender, migration, non-governmental organizations, health and disease, environment and scarcity issues, and so on.
Temple’s History Department is unusually rich in faculty that work on international history. We have scholars here who are experts not only on one nation, continent, or time period, but on historical trends and patterns that cross borders and that find peoples of various national backgrounds interacting, competing, warring and even peace-making. This is why we have attracted such an able body of graduate students here to work in these areas, and they are beginning to make their mark in the field of international history.
Programming:The Workshop will move along three axes.
I. The Workshop hosts a once-monthly reading circle for Temple faculty and graduate students. This is an open-ended discussion of a reading chosen by common consensus.
II. The Workshop hosts a speaker series which convenes four times per semester, featuring presentations by scholars working in international history. The list of speakers is chosen by consensus of the workshop participants. Care will be taken to include Temple and Philadelphia-region scholars along with faculty from other universities. This will help establish stronger ties between Temple and regional programs, while also keeping costs low.
III. A one-day symposium is held each year. The theme varies each year, but the purpose of the symposium is to showcase the work of faculty and especially graduate students in the field of international history; and to promote professional contacts between graduate students at Temple and other leading programs. The symposium, limited to perhaps a dozen invited guests in addition to Temple faculty and students, is structured in such as way as to mix presentations by faculty and graduate students, and to give particular prominence to one or two distinguished historians in this field from other universities.
Affiliation:
The Workshop will be housed under the Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy and the History Department, but its programming will be distinct. Its programming will be designed by a committee drawn from the affiliated faculty below.
Associated Faculty:
David Farber: Protest Movements, US and World
Petra Goedde: Cold War, Gender
Regina Gramer: Europe, United States, Cold War
William Hitchcock: US-European Relations, Cold War
Richard Immerman: US Foreign Relations
Andrew Isenberg: Transnational, Environmental
Rita Krueger: Central European Empires
Jay Lockenour: Germany, Military, War and Society
Sophie Quinn-Judge: Vietnam, Southeast Asia
Harvey Neptune: Caribbean, Transnational, Americas
Art Schmidt: World Economy, Latin America
Todd Shepard: Empire, Sexuality, Europe
Bryant Simon: Globalization, Culture
Gregory Urwin: US Military, British Empire
Vlad Zubok: Soviet Union, Cold War
Contact: For more information, you can reach us at IHW@temple.edu
For Information about the 2007 IHW, click here