DUKE UNIVERSITY'S DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY: A NEW CURRICULUM FOR THE FIRST TWO YEARS

One centerpiece of our reforms is a clearer programmatic structure during the first two years of graduate study. We have offered an overview of the reconstructed core courses on a separate "snaphot"; here we describe the overarching goals and mechanics for a more integrated course of study -- one that maintains substantial flexibility, but seeks to provide more seminar experiences (with concomitant benefits for intellectual community), to attract more graduate students from outside the department, and to prepare our own students more directly for the later tasks that we require of them.

Shortcomings of the Previous Curriculum

In our early discussions about the graduate program, students and faculty alike stressed a series of problems in early coursework. The combination of smaller class sizes and largely uncoordinated course offerings had led to a situation in which students frequently confronted a grab bag of graduate courses, and found themselves relying heavily on independent studies to fulfill their requirements. They also encountered a wide range of expectations among professors about the kinds of requirements appropriate for graduate seminars, as well as course experiences that frequently did not clearly connect to later elements of the program, such as preliminary examinations or the production of a dissertation prospectus. The result, from the perspective of graduate students and faculty alike, was two interrelated problems:

Students further articulated a desire for more systematic preparation for their experiences as teachers, whether as discussion leaders, supervisors of undergraduate research, or instructors in charge of their own classes.

Faculty members additionally reported that advanced graduate students did not always have crucial analytical building blocks in place before embarking on the more sophisticated work of dissertation research. Several professors further noted that the department could do a much better job of integrating all of the faculty into graduate training, even those who did not supervise many students themselves.

Some of these complaints, we wish to stress, had less salience in some fields, like Latin American and Military History, which already enjoyed a clear sequence of regularly offered courses and steady student demand, in apart because of extensive cooperation with those fields at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. But our deliberations led to a strong consensus that we should create a more formal structure for the first two years of study.

Parameters for Readings Courses

These courses will introduce students to key conceptual issues, furnish intellectual breadth, lay a foundation for preliminary examinations, and give students a practical introduction to aspects of the historians' craft, like the book review and the historiographic essay. The assignments in these courses should call for historiographic, conceptual, or methodological essays, not research papers based on investigation and interpretation of primary documents.

We envisage two kinds of reading seminars:

1) Broad "topics" courses that extend beyond tradition field boundaries, such as "Topics in the History of Capitalism," or "Topics in the History of Empires." Such courses would:

2) More traditional "field" courses, such as "Topics in Latin American History," or "Topics in Modern American History." These courses would still have:

Examples of Potential Reading Seminars

Intended Consequences of the New Curriculum

Our goals here mirror those for the new core courses. We would like to:

1) build a stronger community among our graduate students, particularly across fields;

2) smooth the transition to preparation for prelims; and

3) better equip our students to embark on the independent work of dissertation research.

Assessing Consequences of the New Curriculum

Once again, the multiple aspects of our reforms will make for challenges in assessing outcomes. We expect to pay close attention to student and faculty views about how the new system is working. We'll also be looking at the rates at which students progress through the program, and our success in attracting good applicants and in recruiting those applicants to whom we offer admission. Our participation in the Carnegie Initiative has already paid dividends in those latter two regards, as we had a strong pool of applicants last year, and a higher than usual yield from our acceptances.

Logic of the New Curriculum

The new curriculum has several guiding principles that emerged from our various discussions in the 2003-04 academic year.

A. Graduate seminars should aim for a broad audience among the department's graduate students, and should be pitched to attract history graduate students from UNC, and/or other graduate or professional students at Duke. Such parameters will both ensure the viability of seminars and give our students the kind of intellectual breadth they will need for preliminary examinations and most academic jobs. As a result, 300 level graduate seminars in history (which are open only to graduate and professional students) should:

B. Students should take most of their courses as seminars, so that they benefit from the intellectual give and take of seminar discussions, get at least some exposure to collaborative work, and have the chance to learn from students whose areas of interest complement their own. As a result, we are implementing:

C. Courses should clearly fall into the category of either "readings seminars," or "research seminars," with students taking at least seven of the former and two of the latter, in addition to the required two core courses. This distinction animates those two revamped core courses -- see related snapshot. We amplify the difference in boxes below.

D. The one course falling outside this dichotomy will be a required teaching course, taken in the second year as graduate students begin their careers as instructors. This course should:

Summary of Reforms for the First Two Years of Graduate Study, Adopted in April 2004
This document lays out the various new requirements discussed in this snapshot, with more bureaucratic detail

Parameters for Research Seminars

These courses, which will build on the core course in research methods, should be sufficiently broad to attract a critical mass of students. Thus they should target either a particular research method that crosses chronological and geographic fields, like "Research in Intellectual History," "or "Research in Social History"; or they should encompass research in a given geographic area across a long temporal frame ("Research in North American History") or research in a given chronological epoch across space ("Research in Pre-Modern History).

Students in these seminars will embark on an intensive semester long research project, culminating in a polished research paper. The department will encourage experimentation in these seminars, such as with collaborative projects. We expect the seminars to function as writing workshops, with:

As with the readings courses, we expect regular offerings of these seminars, with faculty rotating in and out of them.

Examples of Potential Research Seminars

New Approach to the M.A.

The research papers culminating from the two second-year two research experiences will, if attaining sufficient quality, satisfy the departmental requirement of the M.A. Rather than holding a traditional M.A. defense, we expect to convene a faculty committee for each student completing the second year's work, to discuss that student's: