A. Program Description.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

B. Special Programs. 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

C. Financial Aid. 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.

D. Degree Requirements. The University of Oklahoma History Department prepares the next generation of professional historians—scholars with an understanding of and capacity for historical research, critical analytic and writing skills, and intellectual honesty and rigor. Drawing on the highest standards of our professional discipline, an OU graduate education involves the realization of an individual research agenda; diverse opportunities for professional career development; and active participation in an intellectual community.

The University requires 90 hours of course work for the PhD degree. The 90 hours will include 26-36 hours credit from MA work, 26-36 hours credit of graduate course work (nine of these hours can be outside the department), and the remaining credit hours working toward the dissertation. On completion of all course work, the student will complete their general examination which consists of two parts: three written examinations given over the course of 3 weeks, and a two-hour oral examination at the conclusion of successful written exams.

The doctoral dissertation is the final and most important component in the academic experiences that culminate in the awarding of the doctoral degree. The dissertation must be a work of original research and scholarship that contributes to existing historical knowledge. It must demonstrate the candidate’s mastery of research methods and tools of their field. A history dissertation involves an original and compelling topic, outlines one or more research questions that require and facilitate analysis and construction of a historical narrative, and makes an argument or arguments in response to those questions based on extensive research and analysis, drawing on and engaging with the work of historians and scholars in other disciplines. Research questions, arguments, historical and historiographical positioning, sources, methods, and chapters should be outlined in the introduction. The chapters are the building blocks of the story and argument. They narrate the story the introduction previews, drawing on rich and diverse primary and secondary source material. The conclusion should reiterate the dissertation’s primary arguments, framing them in the context of history and analysis presented in the chapters and reaching out to comparative and interdisciplinary discussions.

According to Graduate College regulations, the dissertation must be completed, approved by the adviser and the dissertation committee, and defended in a public examination within five years of the time the student has completed the general examination.