The Department of History at the University of Oklahoma has awarded graduate degrees for more than one hundred years. Our internationally recognized faculty publish groundbreaking scholarship and lead professional organizations in the United States and around the globe. Faculty members engage in one-on-one mentoring of graduate students in an inclusive, supportive, and intellectually dynamic environment.
Our department offers premier programs and a strong placement record in its core fields:
History of the American West
Native American History
Environmental History
Latin American History
Transnational Women’s and Gender History
Other graduate students work with the department’s Schusterman Center for Judaic and Israel Studies or in other fields, particularly at the MA level. Our program has developed exciting new opportunities in public history as well.
OU offers graduate students unparalleled research resources, rich funding sources, and distinctive professional opportunities, such as:
Editorial fellowships with the Western Historical Quarterly, Journal of Women’s History, and University of Oklahoma Press
Schusterman Center for Judaic & Israel Studies, the largest home for its field in the region
Dissertation Research and Completion Fellowships from the Dodge Family College of Arts & Sciences and the Provost’s Office
Jack Haley Fellowships, providing summer stipends while students use Western History Collections materials to advance their research and develop curatorial experience
Conference and research travel grants from the Graduate College, the College of Arts & Sciences, the Graduate Student Senate, and the History Department
History Research Workshop where students share and develop their scholarship with faculty and fellow students
OU’s membership in the Newberry Library’s Consortium in Native American and Indigenous Studies, which offers a Summer Institute, Graduate Student Conference, and Spring Seminar in Research Methods
Bizzell Memorial Library, featuring more than 2.5 million books, 1.6 million government publications, and 16,000 journals
Western History Collections, among the most important facilities in the world for Native American, Western American, and Environmental History, with 65,000 books, 10,000 cubic feet of manuscripts, and nearly 2 million photographs
History of Science Collections, a foremost collection of rare books from 1467 to the present.
Carl Albert Center, one of the largest and most comprehensive congressional studies centers in the country
Zarrow Family Faculty and Graduate Center, a library space exclusively dedicated to supporting the research and teaching needs of OU faculty and graduate students
Fred Jones, Jr. Museum of Art and Sam Noble Museum of Natural History, among the country’s best university museums with rich research resources related to our core fields
OU graduate students have garnered highly competitive research grants and fellowships, such as the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship, Higham Research Fellowship (OAH), and the Ridge and Rundell Fellowships (WHA), among others.
Recent graduates have received post-doctoral fellowships with the Mahindra Humanities Institute at Harvard, the USC Society of Fellows in the Humanities, and the Clement Center at SMU, among others.
Our program boasts an excellent placement record, with graduates building successful careers as tenure-track professors at research universities and liberal arts colleges; public historians; and editors at scholarly presses.
To learn more about admission to the program.
