Early Modern European history is one of the department’s best known and most successful Ph.D programs. Building on the work of the late J. Russell Major, an internationally known expert on French Renaissance government and society whose doctoral students now hold a number of major positions in the profession, the current faculty members are proud of our close, collegial cooperation and our record in guiding students individually towards successful topics and careers.

Our interests encompass much of traditional social history and a great deal of the newer cultural history. Sharon Strocchia is pursuing research on women and religion in fifteenth-century Florence, and she is interested in early modern gender and sexuality as well as the social history of medicine. James Melton specializes in early modern German and Habsburg history, with a special interest in the culture and civilization of Enlightenment Europe. He has also published on historiography. Judith Miller, who is an expert on eighteenth and nineteenth century France, studies the French Revolution and its economic, legal and literary consequences. Philippe Rosenberg's specialty is early modern Britain. He is working on discourses of cruelty and violence and other cultural topics. Please note that because Prof. Rosenberg will be on leave in 2010-11, no students focusing on early modern Britain will be accepted into the graduate program in 2009-10.

We collaborate closely with Jonathan Strom from the Theology School, who is an expert on the Protestant Reformation in Germany. In addition, we maintain close relations with the medieval program, especially Stephen White, whose interests in feuding and peacemaking, kinship and clientage, and legal history in the central Middle Ages dovetail well with those of the early modernists. We draw additional strength from our Colonial American colleagues. We also anticipate interesting exchanges on global history with Tonio Andrade, who arrived in 2003 to do East Asian history, specializing in European-Asian exchanges in the seventeenth century. He is also well versed in early modern Dutch history.

Features of the program are a flexible system of minor and major field preparations tailored to the particular interests of the student; ties with other programs on campus such as the Medieval Studies program and the Art History and Religion departments, and seminars on early modern topics by invited distinguished scholars under the auspices of the Vann Seminar. Another resource for early modern students is the Major Fellowship to complete the dissertation.

The Woodruff Library has one of the finest collections in the country on early modern history. The Pitts Theology Library also has rich collections on the Reformation era. In addition to the regular departmental fellowships and awards, prospective students might note the Blair Rogers and J. Russell Major Dissertation Fellowship, a substantial grant which is awarded annually to a student for dissertation research on European history in the period c. 1350 to c. 1715.

In recent years the Department has been quite successful at placing early modernists in tenure-track jobs despite a competitive job market.

Further information about application, funding, course requirements, courses offered, placement