Faculty and graduate students in the Department of History conduct path-breaking research in a wide variety of fields on a diverse range of topics. Faculty members have published books with prestigious university presses, and their articles have appeared in the principal scholarly journals in the fields of American, European, Asian, and World History.
Faculty research specialties in U.S. history include: urban environmental history; 1960s urban policy; the social and cultural history of the American West; American borderlands; U.S. foreign relations; Native American sovereignty; 20th-century U.S. religious history; women, gender and colonialism; and immigration and labor. Our European historians are conducting research on slavery in the early modern Atlantic world; 19th-century French intellectual history; war memory in the 20th century; Russian and East European social and cultural history; the British Empire; and early modern European social, cultural, and religious history. Our world historians are working on such subjects as Afro-Caribbean encounters; Japan during the Second World War; Islamic civilization; ethnicity, religion, and nationalism in modern China; and British imperialism in Southwest Asia.
The department maintains a particularly strong research focus in the history of the American West and the Pacific Northwest, religious history, world history, public history, and the history of empire. Faculty have recently published books on opium policy in Southeast Asia, food culture in the Caribbean, American evangelism in the interwar period, religious tolerance in Netherlands during the Reformation, cross-dressing and sexuality in the American West, and urban sustainability in Seattle.
- Information on publications, honors, and awards can be found on individual faculty pages
- A listing of recent book publications is available on the Faculty Books page
- Visit the Guide to Graduate Fields of Study & Major Professors to learn about faculty research specialties