Over the past decade, Emory University's History Department has built a first-rate Ph.D. program in African history, focusing on the eighteenth through twentieth centuries and the western and southern regions of the continent. Our strengths lie in providing students excellent training in African history, outstanding opportunities for comparative study in a number of complementary fields and disciplines, and a broad and deep foundation in African Studies through Emory's internationally-recognized Institute of African Studies. Close student-faculty interaction and strong student morale and comradeship in history and with teachers and peers in African Studies are hallmarks of our program.

Students entering Emory University in African history will work closely with a number of faculty. Kristin Mann specializes in the history of the Yoruba-speaking peoples in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing particularly on marriage and gender, slavery and emancipation. Clifton Crais is interested in Southern Africa, state formation and political culture, inequality and environmental change, history and anthropology, and comparative empire. David Eltis is an authority on the history of the early modern Atlantic world, the slave trade, slavery, and migration both coerced and free. We also collaborate closely with Edna Bay of the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts and other faculty affiliated with the Institute of African Studies. Pamela Scully, in Women's Studies and the Institute of African Studies, works on slavery and emancipation, and on comparative gender and women's history in Africa and in the greater Atlantic world.

Students studying African history at Emory take required courses in African Historiography and Research Methods in African History, as well as topical courses that vary annually and are shaped by student needs and faculty interests. Students in addition have superb opportunities to pursue collateral training in Atlantic World history and anthropology, as well as on women and gender, race and ethnicity, public scholarship, and material culture and visual representation. We are proud of our past and present students for the prestigious Fulbright, Rockefeller, and other fellowships they have won, the outstanding research they have conducted, and the jobs they have garnered in a competitive marketplace.

For information about related programs at Emory University see, in addition to the Institute of African Studies, Anthropology, Art History, Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts, Women's Studies Program, African American Studies Program, Carlos Museum of Art and Archaeology, and Center for the Study of Public Scholarship.

Further Information

Virtual Tour of the Graduate History Program