About
In the Department of History, our vibrant intellectual community of students and scholars does more than explore history. We make it every day.
Students take on local internships, immersive courses at historical sites and research projects alongside our more than 40 full-time faculty members. They have received awards from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the American Historical Association, the Turkish Studies Association, the Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati, the Cosmos Club Foundation and more. They have presented their work across the country and published books of their own with the top presses in the field.
Faculty are critically acclaimed authors and recipients of prestigious fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. They frequently win GW’s Morton A. Bender, Trachtenberg and Writing in the Disciplines awards for their excellence in teaching and engagement. They are authors of peer-reviewed journal articles, panelists at scholarly events and regular expert contributors for C-SPAN, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.
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Our Statement on Equity and Inclusion
As historians, it is our job to interpret the past to the best of our understanding, recovering unacknowledged and uncomfortable truths. The GW History Department understands that this vital work includes reckoning with the historic and ongoing injustices produced by systems of oppression as well as our own implicit biases. These injustices have targeted and continue to harm our students, colleagues, and fellow humans on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, culture, class, religion, language, abilities/disabilities, mental health, age, geographic origin, educational attainment, as well as legal and employment status. Our efforts to promote equity in the place of injustice will require time, dedication, and financial resources. We pledge to make this change, both to redress harm and in order to create the conditions for a democratic environment in which diverse representation ensures the free and open exchange of ideas. The work of advancing equity and inclusion will not be achieved with a single act or set of acts. Rather than provide an exhaustive list of changes that we will be implementing immediately and over the long-term, we are offering this statement as an expression of our accountability. This process will demand our constant and sustained attention. We are committed to meeting this demand.
"We went to the Library of Congress for our Dean's Seminar class on empires [to] see an exhibit of artifacts from the time of Columbus' arrival in the Americas. The maps and artifacts gave a visual history that one cannot get out of a textbook or lecture."
Albert Cramer
BA '12
