George Behlmer: Areas of Graduate Study

Division: Europe Since 1789

Graduate study in the "Modern Britain" field will focus on the social, cultural, and political dimensions of British history from the advent of industrialization (circa 1760) through the Second World War. Within this broad time period, students will develop expertise in several historiographic themes. These themes, in turn, will be established through negotiation between the student and the field supervisor. Examples of themes negotiated with current and former graduate students include the following: the Victorian missionary movement; law and working-class culture; the authority of medicine; feminism and militancy; the policing of manners; and British responses to Irish revolutionary challenges.

Division: Comparative History (Comparative Colonialisms)*

This field will focus on the process by which Great Britain acquired and subsequently relinquished the world's most extensive colonial empire. The chronological focus here is from 1781 through the 1970s. Its territorial focus will be on British colonial policies in the Pacific and the Caribbean, as well as on the tortured colonial relationship with Ireland.

*Students may not offer a field in the Comparative History division as a first field.