Irvine's Graduate Program in History combines a distinctive approach to graduate study with an outstanding faculty. The program is designed to provide students with both advanced historical skills and a rigorous grounding in historical theory. This combination of theoretical study with training in historical method reflects the Department's conviction that scholars should be encouraged to deal with significant questions about the past and to approach these questions in a methodologically sophisticated way. The Department is small enough to offer close attention to students' specific needs and to function as an intellectual community.
Students play a large role in departmental life.
Within these broad areas, we have further concentrated on such fields as France, social history, cultural history, critical theory, women's history, and the rural history of East Asia. Within these fields the department's faculty equals or surpasses the faculties at much larger universities. Another distinctive feature of graduate study at UC Irvine is the availability of Interdisciplinary and Inter-campus Programs. Central to UCI's Graduate Program is the Department's emphasis on theory. We believe that the best historical research involves the self-conscious use of theory to pose significant questions and to answer them in sophisticated ways.