This track offers training in historical literatures, conceptual frameworks, and research strategies that transcend national and regional boundaries. Students may work with various faculty members whose interests lie in international, transnational, comparative or world history. They may also take advantage of Columbia’s rich, interdisciplinary regional studies resources, including the Center for International History, recently established by Mark Mazower.

A core course, Approaches to International and Global History, introduces students to historiographies and methodologies in transnational and global history. In consultation with their advisors, students will develop four exam fields on the basis of their research and teaching interests. At least two of the fields should be trans-regional in content, and at least one must be in the historical literature of a specific region or nation, along with relevant language training. The trans-regional fields can be both thematic and geographical in scope, such as comparative colonialisms or empires, comparative slavery, Atlantic world, Indian Ocean, migration, the Cold War, technology, environment, racial formations, borderlands and frontiers, globalization, world history, etc.

Graduate history courses with a relevant orientation recently taught at Columbia include:

• Colloquium in the Comparative History of Women and Gender (Kessler-Harris)
• Disease, Public Health and Empire: Comparative Perspectives (Stepan)
• Domestic Animals and Human History (Bulliet)
• Enlightenment: Western and Others (Stanislawski)
• European Merchants and International Trade, 1300-1700 (Howell & Howard)
• Honor and Masculinity in Modern Societies (Piccato)
• Medieval Mediterranean (Kosto)
• Modern Crime and Punishment in Historical Perspective (Piccato)
• Native Bodies and Colonial Discipline (Rao)
• Population Control: Eugenics, Malthusianism and Migration (Connelly)
• Projects and Practices of Colonial Rule in the 20th Century (Pedersen)
• Problematics of History and International Relations (Stephanson)
• Production of the Past (Dirks)
• Technology in History (Bulliet)
• Telling the Twentieth Century (Gluck)
• The United States, the West and the Middle East (Khalidi)
• World History Colloquium (Bulliet)