[Reader-list] Ph.D in History at Emory University

[Debjani Bhattacharyya]

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_EMORY UNIVERSITY _ 

Department of History 

Atlanta, GA 30322 USA 

Emory University has a very competitive doctoral program in South Asian/colonial and postcolonial history. The program is small (we admit only a few students each year), with a great deal of faculty/graduate student contact. In less than three years we have built up a cohort of a dozen graduate students in various disciplinary areas – History, Anthropology, Literature and Religion, for example. 

Students entering Emory University in South Asian history will work closely with Professors Gyanendra Pandey, Ruby Lal and V. Narayana Rao. Professor Narayana Rao is an authority on early modern and modern cultural history, and questions relating to literature and translation, with a special interest in peninsular India. Professor Lal is a specialist on the Mughal (early modern) and early colonial period of India history, with a particular focus on gender, Islam and questions of domestic life in the making of the modern. Professor Pandey’s work focuses on issues of caste, class and nationalist struggles in colonial and postcolonial times, the history of marginalized populations, and questions of violence, memory and history.  

The History Ph.D. program provides students with rigorous training in their fields of specialization while encouraging comparative study. All entering students take “Introduction to Advanced Historical Study,” a course designed to introduce students to the influential paradigms that animate and shape historical research and writing today. In addition, all students in the Asian History stream are required to take a seminar on “Modern Asian Historiography: colonialism, postcolonialism and the making of the modern”. Students also have a wide range of course opportunities for study outside of the field since Emory University is fortunate to have clusters of scholars working on a wide range of topics including race and ethnicity, gender, law, political culture, religion, as well as colonial and postcolonial studies. Graduate students form the core of our important inter-disciplinary workshop in colonial and postcolonial studies, which takes the form of a weekly or fortnightly seminar with pre-circulated papers, and also hosts an annual graduate student-organized workshop (with participants from universities around the US). Other departments – including the Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts, Anthropology, Women’s Studies, African American Studies, Religion and Law – also run research seminars that are of interest to students from other disciplines.  

 The History Department is able to offer graduate students fellowships of tuition plus living stipends of around $16,000 (for nine months), renewable for five years. All fellowships carry commitments to work in teaching and research assistance after the first year. In addition, applicants compete with other students for Emory University’s prestigious Woodruff and Arts and Sciences Fellowships, which provide a higher stipend. Further information on the department, fellowships and research awards, and on the admission process, is available URL http://www.emory.edu/HISTORY/graduate/index.html 

 The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the History Department provide pre- and post-prospectus research funds on a competitive basis along with conference funds for students presenting papers. Our students are already developing a good record in winning American Institute of Indian Studies, Fulbright and Social Science Research Council fellowships to support their scholarship.  

Please feel free to contact us with any questions you might have. We would also be happy to put you in touch with some of our current graduate students if you would like.