Department of History, Carr Building, Duke University's East Campus

REMAKING GRADUATE EDUCATION:

THE CARNEGIE INITIATIVE ON THE DOCTORATE AT DUKE UNIVERSITY'S DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

We view our efforts to improve our department's graduate program as ambitious -- less because of the central importance or far-reaching character of any single proposal we are considering, and more because of our commitment to rethink the program as a whole, and to reconfigure its various parts to connect more effectively. The discussion below and in related documents and "snapshots" provide great detail about our plans and strategies.

Duke has long had a strong tradition of graduate education in history, and we have no intention to let go of the considerable strengths of our program -- particularly the close attention graduate students receive from our faculty, our close relationship with other area history departments and history working groups, and our students' ability to tailor courses of study that cross the boundaries of fields and the discipline of history itself. But we do wish to create a clearer path for our students in navigating the program, and to ensure that our training prepares them for the practice of history amid the globalization and technological transformations of the twenty-first century.

Faculty and Staff of the Duke History Department, April 2004

HISTORY AT DUKE

Graduate Program, Department of History, 212A Carr Building, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708-0719

Phone (919) 684-3014 Fax (919) 681-7670

Key Participants in the CID

Duke's Graduate Program in History
Our site includes a full description of current courses, the current graduate student handbook, a directory of current students, and application information.

DUKE'S APPROACH TO GRADUATE STUDY IN HISTORY

Over the past decade, we have, like most leading history departments, reduced our intake of Ph.D. students. We now generally admit between 8 and 12 students a year, almost all of whom receive five years of full funding either from Duke or outside funding agencies. We offer graduate training in most geographic and chronological concentrations, but most of our recent students have focused their work in Modern Europe, Modern Latin America, the British Empire, the United States, or Military History.

The graduate program at Duke is characterized by close relationships between faculty and graduate students, and substantial flexibility for students in defining a course of study, and significant participation of graduate students in departmental governance. Graduate students receive considerable experience in the classroom, usually having the opportunity to lead discussion sections, direct undergraduate research papers, and teach their own seminars and/or small lecture courses over the course of their years in graduate school. Every year, several of senior graduate students also teach their own courses at area colleges and universities.

Our faculty is characterized by a tendency to integrate research methods from other disciplines, and to pursue research agendas that cross over traditional sub-disciplinary fields. Duke's history graduate students often tackle similarly ambitious research topics, and have had good success in landing tenure track positions in academia, with numerous recent graduates gaining employment at leading research universities and liberal arts colleges. Several of our Ph.Ds also work for goverment agencies, non-governmental organizations, corporations, or in public history.

Commonalities PowerPoint
Slides for a powerpoint presentation on the characteristics of our current graduate program, given at the Jan. 2004 convening by Tom Rogers

Key Ideas PowerPoint
Slides for a powerpoint presentation on our early proposals for reform, given at the Jan. 2004 convening by Laura Edwards

Improving Graduate Education through the CID

After a collective reconsideration of our graduate program from the ground up, we have identified four main goals for our CID initiative:

1) to maintain the core of our program's current flexibility, while adding a more structured and predictable set of course experiences in the first two years, encouraging our students to cultivate intellectual breadth as well as depth, and involving a greater percentage of our faculty in graduate teaching;

2) to build more effective connections between the various formal pieces of the program (coursework, apprenticeship in teaching, prelims, and dissertation research/writing);

3) to foster a more vibrant intellectual community among graduate students and faculty, recognizing the challenges of doing so as our class sizes have come down in the past decade; and

4) to ensure that our graduates are prepared to thrive in the next generation's professional environment for historians -- one that will likely be predicated on facility with information technology, proficiency with a variety of historical methodologies, and an ability to speak and write to both professional and broader audiences.

TIMELINE OF CID DELIBERATIONS

Fall 2003 Initial Discussions

Jan 2004 CID Convening: Brainstorming

Jan-Mar 2004 CID Team development of agenda

April 2004 Adoption of Carnegie Report

Summer 2004 Proposal of New Graduate Courses

2004-05 Implementing New Curriculum

Fall 2004 (planned) CID Team Discussions:

OUR ACCOMPLISHMENTS IN 2003-04

* Extensive assessment of the graduate program and of trends in the discipline of history

* Adoption of a resulting report on the graduate program (see link below), which:

* Highlights of the new curricular changes:

Innovation 1: Revamping Core Courses
This snapshot provides an overview of our reconstructed two core courses, an introduction to historiography, and an introduction to historical research methods.

February 2004 Report on Reforms to the Duke Graduate Program
This report lays out our departmental CID agenda and outlining the initial reform package adopted by the department in April, 2004

February 2004 Report, pdf version

Innovation 2: The New Curriculum for the First Two Years

KEY CHALLENGES, 2004-05 (and probably beyond)

Implementation of the New Curriculum

Improving Mentoring/Assessment

Rethinking Prelims

Deepening Intellectual Community