The interests of the faculty in European history span a broad geographic and temporal spectrum: from Russia to England, from the middle ages to the second half of the twentieth century. The department is particularly strong in the history of thought in Medieval Europe, in British history, in the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France, and in modern Russian/Eastern European history. Clusters of faculty also share interests in gender history, the history of empire, and in political, social, cultural and intellectual history.

Our three-semester core course sequence, required of all entering graduate students, reflects our belief that the study of Europe must be placed within a larger global context. Students and faculty have additional opportunities to explore the role of Europe in the world by working with scholars in other disciplines through the School of Global Studies.

Graduate students are encouraged to travel to Europe to conduct their research, and faculty members assist them in seeking funding and obtaining access to the relevant archives. Arizona State University offers courses in all major European languages and, through summer institutes, training in critical Eastern European languages rarely taught.

Faculty

Roger Adelson works on British and U.S. policy toward the Middle East during the twentieth century and the historiography of comparative and global history.

Andrew Barnes, who has written on both European and African history, is writing a study of Christian missions in colonial northern Nigeria.

Stephen Batalden is a specialist on the religious and cultural history of modern Russia and the Balkans, as well as the director of the The Melikian Center: Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies.  

Rachel Fuchs is working on a book about the social construction of paternity and the family in modern France. She has just completed a book on poverty and gender in Europe for Cambridge University Press, and, with Victoria Thompson, a book on women in nineteenth-century Europe for Palgrave Press.

Monica Green's research interests include the history of women's health care, medieval European history, history of science, and race and medicine.

Anna Holian teaches modern German and Eastern European history.  She is currently writing a book about displaced persons in post-World War II Germany, which examines how narratives about National Socialism and Soviet communism provided a basis for identification and conflict among individual DPs. With Brian Gratton, she directs the web-based project “Refuge and Rejection."

Laurie Manchester  specializes in modern Russia. She has published on the religious origins of revolution and the emergence of modern selfhood in Russia. Her current research focuses on social estate and gender functioning as race in Imperial Russia and Russians who traveled or migrated to China, Africa and Latin America. 

Hava Tirosh-Samuelson is a Jewish intellectual historian who focuses on the medieval and early modern interplay of philosophy and mysticism, Judaism and ecology, Judaism and science, and gender and Jewish philosophy.

Victoria Thompson is a cultural historian of France and the French empire.  The author of The Virtuous Marketplace: Women and Men, Money and Politics in Paris, 1830–1870, her current project on “Paris in Ruins" examines the relationship between political change and perceptions of the urban landscape during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Retha Warnicke's research interests include politics and protocol at the Tudor court, gender issues, and Jacobean funeral sermons for women.

J. Kent Wright's work focuses on the intellectual history of the Enlightenment.