A. Program Description. Few departments and universities in the nation offer the range of instruction available at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. The Department's programs in Asian, Pacific Islands, and World History are particularly strong. This Department has long offered a spectrum of courses on the histories of Asia and the Pacific Islands, as well as a complex variety of courses on Europe and the United States. The Department of History has thus anticipated the current nationwide interest at colleges and universities in a globally informed and diverse education. Also of special note are the teaching and research interests of the Department's faculty in film, ethnography, cultural studies, environmental history, digital humanities, and other interdisciplinary approaches to history.

B. Special Programs. Of particular importance is the Department's pioneering program in a truly global and comparative world history. Since 1986, the Department of History has offered a field of graduate study in World History, and the Department has supported the Journal of World History from 1990 to the present. In 2002, the Department became the home of the Center for World History and, until 2013, was the home for the World History Association.

The University's Hamilton Library is a major resource for the study of Asian and Pacific history. The Library holds more than 2.8 million volumes, and currently receives nearly 27,000 serial and periodical titles. The Library's general collections, which include substantial ranges of research materials on Asian, Pacific Islands, and American history, are supplemented by a U.S. Government Documents Collection that has been an official depository since 1909; an Asia Collection of several hundred thousand volumes, over half of which are in the Chinese, Japanese, or Korean languages; an unrivaled Hawaiian and Pacific Collection; and the Charlot Collection. The Asia Collection includes 27,000 reels of microfilm. It has been a depository for Public Law 480 materials for South Asia since 1961 and for Indonesia since 1964. In addition, the Library has developed extensive holdings on specialized topics of interest to students of Pacific and Asian history, such as Russian-language publications on Asia and the Pacific.

The richest archival holdings in the world on the history of Hawai'i and the Pacific Islands are located in Honolulu. These holdings are in the manuscript, document, and book collections of the Hawaiian and Pacific Collection in the Hamilton Library, the Hawai'i War Records Depository, the Archives of the State of Hawai'i, the Bernice P. Bishop Museum, and the collections of the Mission Children's Society and the Hawaiian Historical Society.

C. Financial Aid. Graduate teaching assistantships constitute the largest source of financial assistance available to students through the Department of History. The primary duty of graduate teaching assistants is to assist faculty in the World History Program by grading papers, counseling students, and conducting weekly discussion sessions with students taking History 151 or 152. The Department of History calculates the work load of graduate teaching assistants at 20 hours per week, so assistants carry course loads of no more than nine hours per semester.

Prospective students must indicate on their applications whether they wish to be considered for departmental funding opportunities. The assistantships are renewable, assuming satisfactory progress toward the degree, for a maximum of two years at the MA level and three years at the PhD level (though never longer than necessary to complete a degree program). For details about graduate teaching assistantships and application forms, please visit http://manoa.hawaii.edu/history/graduate-program/prospective-grad-student-info/.

The Department of History has limited amounts of other forms of financial assistance. Graduate Division has authorized the Department to award merit-based tuition waivers. This requires students to be enrolled for at least one credit or more of degree-related courses, and maintain a grade-point average of 3.5 or better.

Students majoring in Chinese intellectual history are eligible to apply for the Hung Family Fellowship, which the Department of History awards. The Department also awards a few fellowships and grants for small amounts of money to advanced students. These include John F. Kennedy Fellowships, usually between $1,250 to $2,500, for dissertation research travel; Sakai Awards, usually no more than $750, for travel to professional meetings and job interviews; and Kwok Grants for dissertation-related expenses.

The Department of History encourages prospective students to inquire about and apply for all sources of extra-departmental funding for which they might be eligible.

D. Degree Requirements. The candidate must prove competence by the acquisition of a broad background in general History, passing four comprehensive examinations in two broad geographic areas of history and completing an original dissertation and a final oral examination. While there is no set minimum for credit hours in the PhD program, candidates must take a graduate-level seminar in historiography and must complete at least one graduate-level reading course in each field of their comprehensive exams. The candidate must also demonstrate a knowledge of at least two foreign languages related to the dissertation topic; for students of American or Hawaiian History an alternative requirement may, at the discretion of the doctoral committee, be substituted for one of the languages.