Department of History focus areas

In terms of research and preparation of graduate students, we have identified five focus areas. Click on the name of a focus area for more information about it.

• Two formerly separate focus areas are now combined in African-American History and Critical Race Studies. Four full-time faculty members specialize in African-American history and other scholars in the department have researched and written on the African-American experience in slavery, organized labor, the city of Memphis, as well as on the history of black women. Critical Race Studies is an often-interdisciplinary field that examines the historical evolution of race as a social category for discriminating, organizing, regulating, and maintaining social differences along racial lines.
• Given our geographic location and academic holdings, The University of Memphis provides unique opportunities for the study of Southern History.
• Crossing geographical and chonological barriers, our faculty also specialize in Women, Gender, and Family History, with scholarship in such diverse realms as the medieval images of female warriors, “The Queer Jew” in Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophy, biographies of anthropologist Ruth Benedict and Senator Margaret Chase Smith, women and family in Latin America, and the dynamics of gender and race in the 19th-century American South.
• We boast an interdisciplinary program in Egyptology, which involves formal relationship with the art history departments to maintain The Institute of Egyptian Art and Archaeology.
• Finally, we have a new focus area in Global History.

University areas of focus

In addition to its specific focus areas, the Department of History contributes to several University areas of focus.

• While most of the university’s areas of focus are not specifically related to history, the History Department is strongly engaged in augmenting Teacher Education and Development. Many of the Social Studies teachers in the area have completed our programs as they pursued their degrees in Education.
• The History Department has partnered with the Department of Curriculum and Instructional Leadership in the College of Education, Health and Human Sciences and Memphis City Schools on a U.S. Department of Education grant to enhance knowledge of American history for the teachers in the Memphis City Schools. The Teaching American History Grant was funded for three years (2003-2005) at nearly one million dollars. Dr. Janann Sherman served as academic director for two years, then project director on this grant; seven other history faculty members offered courses, seminars and workshops under this grant. The lectures by keynote speakers (Alan Taylor, William C. Davis, Eric Foner, David Oshinsky, Robert Dallek, and Robert Buzzanco) were recorded and are available through Podcast Central.
• Dr. Kent Schull, a specialist in the Modern Middle East, is working with representatives in the College of Education, Health and Human Sciences to develop curriculum concerning Muslims in America and, more specifically, Muslims in Memphis. The project, entitled “Integration Through Education: Muslims of Memphis and America,” has a Tennessee Board of Regents Diversity Grant for $100,000.