Introduction
The purpose of this Handbook is to introduce students to graduate programs in history at the Catholic University of America and to gather into one place most of the information you will need during your graduate studies. Please read the Handbook carefully and then refer to it as you progress in your studies. While this Handbook will be updated regularly, the definitive statement of University policies can be found in the CUA Graduate Announcements and the University’s graduate policies website. In the case of conflict with this Handbook, the rules presented in the Graduate Announcements stand.
In the words of the late, and much lamented, historian of Tudor and Stuart England, Mark Kishlansky: “The purpose of graduate school is to get out of graduate school.” This Handbook is designed to help you on that journey. We encourage you to take full advantage of the resources available to you in this Department, University, and the area as a whole. Come to Department events, explore the museums and libraries of the city, see what is going on at other universities. The more you put into your education, the more you will get out of it. Stay connected with the Department, your professors, and your fellow students; all will help you on your journey through graduate school. The faculty of the Department aim to train you in the key skills of research, analysis, and communication that define the historian, to enable you to use those skills productively in a fulfilling and meaningful career, inside or outside the academy. This Handbook is therefore a roadmap to your journey though graduate study in History.
Overview of the Graduate Programs
The Department of History and Anthropology at CUA prides itself upon its professional but friendly atmosphere of close interaction between students and faculty. As a small Department, we place a great premium on the careful supervision of our students. The Department offers both MA and PhD degrees in fields of history in which we have particularly rich faculty and scholarly resources, enumerated below. Graduate education in this Department combines the development of research and teaching skills. Not all of our graduate students go on to the PhD, or make use of their degrees in teaching at the university level. But the basic skills involved in graduate study—in acquiring substantive historical knowledge, in the critical analysis of material, and in the presentation of that analysis—are the same whatever the end use desired. Research is only one aspect of the professional development of a historian; the ability to communicate research and arguments, whether in writing, in debate, or through teaching, is an equally important component. This Department offers multiple opportunities to develop all these abilities. Our program is designed to train students, whatever their future career paths, in these key skills of the historian.
On the MA level, the Department offers an MA degree in History in the following fields: the Americas, Early Modern and Modern Europe, and Medieval European History (with comparative attention to the pre-modern Islamic world). We also offer an MA program in Late Medieval and Early Modern Religion and Society, drawing on the particularly rich resources for the study of religious history available in the Department and the University more broadly. Additionally, we offer joint MA programs in Library and Information Sciences and with the Law School for a joint JD/History MA.
On the PhD level, we offer degrees in the Americas, Early Modern and Modern Europe, and Medieval European History, with particular strength in Medieval History.
Graduate Faculty
The following faculty members of the Department are available to supervise graduate work:
Americas:
Dr. Stephen West, Section Head
Dr. Samuel Fisher
Dr. Michael Kimmage
Dr. Julia Young
Early Modern and Modern European History:
Dr. L.R. Poos, Section Head
Dr. Árpád von Klimó, Department Chair
Dr. Nelson Minnich
Dr. Caroline Sherman
Medieval History:
Dr. Jennifer Davis, Section Head, Director of Graduate Studies in History
Dr. L.R. Poos
Dr. Lev Weitz
The University is also home to many other medievalists, in academic units ranging from Philosophy, to Theology and Religious Studies, to the Department of Ancient and Medieval Languages and Cultures.
Biographies:
Jennifer R. Davis
Jennifer Davis is an historian of early medieval western Europe. Her first book, Charlemagne’s Practice of Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2015), offered a new interpretation of this pivotal early medieval ruler and how he and his men attempted to control his vast empire. Her current project, Per capitularios nostros: Law and its Uses in the Frankish Kingdoms, examines how the Frankish kings produced law and how people in the Frankish orbit sought to put those laws to use. Based extensively on the surviving manuscripts of Frankish capitularies, the book examines how and why various communities copied and used royal law for their own purposes. She is also the editor, with Michael McCormick, of The Long Morning of Medieval Europe: New Directions in Early Medieval Studies (Ashgate, 2008). Dr. Davis has held fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study, the American Academy in Berlin, the American Academy in Rome, and the Fulbright Foundation, among others. She teaches a range of courses on early medieval history, including archaeology for historians and seminars on Carolingian history.
Samuel K. Fisher
Sam Fisher researches, teaches, and writes about colonial America, early modern Britain and Ireland, and the connections between them. His work focuses on the experiences of Irish and Scottish Gaelic and American Indigenous peoples. His recently published book, The Gaelic and Indian Origins of the American Revolution: Diversity and Empire in the British Atlantic 1688-1783 (Oxford University Press), offers a new explanation of the origins of the American Revolution. The project draws on Irish- and Scots-Gaelic language and Indigenous American sources to show how colonized peoples tried to reshape empires in their own image, and how their partial success convinced American colonists to leave the British empire. He is also co-editor of a recent anthology of Irish-language poetry in historical context, Bone and Marrow/Cnámh agus Smior: An Anthology of Irish Poetry from Medieval to Modern (Wake Forest University Press). His next planned project, tentatively titled “As now and in all former ages they have done”: Savage Rebellion and the Forging of a British Atlantic World, takes a comparative approach to rebellions and uprisings by marginalized people within the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British empire, asking whether “savage rebellion” was a meaningful category to people of the time.
Michael Kimmage:
Michael Kimmage specializes in the history of the Cold War, in twentieth-century U.S. diplomatic and intellectual history, and in U.S.-Russian relations since 1991. From 2014 to 2016, he served on the Secretary’s Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, where he held the Russia/Ukraine portfolio. Professor Kimmage is currently on leave from Catholic University while he serves as Director of the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He is the author of five books: The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers and the Lessons of Anti-Communism (Harvard University Press, 2009); In History’s Grip: Philip Roth's Newark Trilogy (Stanford University Press, 2012); Wolfgang Koeppen’s Journey through America (Berghahn, 2012), a German-language travelogue published in 1959 and translated by Professor Kimmage; The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy (Basic Books, 2020); and Collisions: The Origins of the War in Ukraine and the New Global Instability (Oxford University Press, 2024). From 2014 to 2016, he served on the Secretary's Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, where he held the Russia/Ukraine portfolio. Professor Kimmage is a prolific commentator in forums about public policy and has written articles and books reviews for the New York Times, Washington Post, New Republic, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Jewish Review of Books and Los Angeles Review of Books. He has been a visiting professor at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and at Vilnius University in Lithuania.
Árpád von Klimó:
Árpád von Klimó is currently working on editing the Routledge Handbook of Hungarian History which will provide a new introduction on topics such as environmental history, power structures, economy and society, private life, religion and culture throughout the last millennium. It will be based on the work of 30 historians working in Hungary, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States. His next monograph will be on Soccer: A Global History. In this book, Dr von Klimó will provide a short introduction into the relationship between the history of Association Football, the roots of the game with its racist and masculinist character in British imperialism, and how it was transformed when it spread over the globe in the course of the 20th and 21st century. His most recent book, Remembering Cold Days, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2018. Dr. von Klimó also co-edited The Routledge History of East Central Europe since 1700, with Irina Livezeanu (University of Pittsburgh), published in 2017. An updated and completely revised English edition of his book Hungary since 1945 (Routledge) appeared in 2018. His latest publications focused on the networks surrounding Cardinal Mindszenty, the head of the Hungarian Catholic Church. This research resulted in two articles, published in Central European History (2021) and in the Catholic Historical Review (2021). Most recently, his article on “The Cult of Our Lady of Fátima: Modern Catholic Devotion in an Age of Nationalism, Colonialism, and Migration” appeared in 2022 in Religions, an open access journal. He serves as Associate Editor of the Hungarian Studies Review and book review editor (Late Modern Europe) for the Catholic Historical Review.
Nelson Minnich:
Nelson Minnich has taught Renaissance, Reformation, and Counter-Reformation history at the Catholic University of America since 1977, holding a joint appointment as Ordinary Professor in the Church History program of the School of Theology and Religious Studies and in the Department of History and Anthropology. Since 2005 he has been editor of the Catholic Historical Review, having served for over a quarter-century as advisory and associate editor. He holds degrees in philosophy (BA 1965 Boston College), theology (STB 1970 Gregorian University), and History (MA 1966 Boston College, PhD 1977 Harvard University, with a dissertation on "Episcopal Reform at the Fifth Lateran Council (1512-17)" directed by Myron P. Gilmore. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1978), Villa I Tatti (1979), the American Academy in Rome (1979-80), American Council of Learned Societies (1979-80, 1986, 1990), the American Philosophical Society (1984), the Renaissance Society of America (2001), and the National Humanities Center (2004-05). From 2007 until retiring in 2022, he was a member of the Pontificio Comitato di Scienze Storiche. Among the books he has published or co-authored are a Festschrift honoring John Tracy Ellis (1985), three collections of studies that deal mostly with conciliar history from Pisa I to Trent (1993, 2007), and a volume (Collected Works of Erasmus 84) on Erasmus's controversies with Alberto Pio (2005), collections of papers presented at international conferences commemorating the 500th anniversary of the Fifth Lateran Council (2019) and Luther’s posting of the Ninety-Five Theses (2021), The Cambridge Companion to the Council of Trent (2023), The Cambridge History of Reformation-Era Theology (co-edited with Kenneth Appold) (2024), and The Renaissance Papacy, 1400-1600 (2025). He served as the associate editor for the eighty church history entries in the six-volume Encyclopedia of the Renaissance (1999). He is author of 33 chapters in books, 40 articles in scholarly journals, and over thirty entries in encyclopedias and reference works, and numerous book reviews.
L.R. Poos:
L.R. Poos specializes in the history of England in the later-medieval and early-modern periods, roughly from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century. His research focuses upon social, demographic, and legal history. His most recent book is a case study of contested marriage and property in sixteenth-century Lancashire, entitled Love, Hate, and the Law in Tudor England: The Three Wives of Ralph Rishton (Oxford University Press, 2022). His current project is a study of the history of the landscape of the parish of Stebbing (Essex) from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century, employing Geographical Information Systems (GIS) analysis. Professor Poos’s teaching encompasses the histories of rural society, crime and state-building, religion, marriage, and population change. He has a particular interest in digital humanities and their applications to research and learning, and in early Japanese history. Current and recent graduate students have done dissertations and research projects in subjects ranging from Reformation-era England, to disease and crime in early-modern London, to archaeology and history in late-medieval Ireland.
Caroline Sherman:
Caroline Sherman works on early modern intellectual history. Her book, Uses of the Dead: The Early Modern Development of Cy-Près Doctrine (Catholic University of America Press, 2018), examines how a common law rule (to “approximate” the purpose of failing charitable trusts) evolved out of—and in opposition to—ius commune norms on gifts. The book traces the relationship between the creation of the doctrine and the broader cultural context: transformations of the fourteenth century, the rise of humanism, and the aftermath of the secularizations of church property in the Reformation. She is currently working on a book about the Godefroy family of legal-historical scholars.
Lev Weitz:
Lev Weitz is an historian of the Islamic Middle East. His scholarly interests lie in the encounters among Muslims, Christians, and Jews that have shaped the Middle East’s history from the coming of Islam to the present, which he engages in his research and in the classroom. Dr. Weitz's book Between Christ and Caliph: Law, Marriage, and Christian Community in Early Islam (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) examines the multiconfessional society of early Islam through the lens of shifting marital practices of Syriac Christian communities, arguing that interreligious negotiations lie at the heart of the history of the medieval Islamic empire. On the Edge: Global Transformations in the Medieval Egyptian Countryside, Dr. Weitz's current book project, explores how the Muslim and Christian societies of an out-of-the-way corner of Egypt experienced global trends — the expansion of Islam, the rise of Arabic, trade and slavery across the Nile and Sahara — that transformed Afro-Eurasia on either side of the year 1000. At Catholic University, Dr. Weitz teaches a range of courses on Middle Eastern and Mediterranean history from the Middle Ages to modernity and directs the Islamic World Studies program.
Stephen West:
Stephen West researches and teaches the history of the United States, with a particular focus on the political and social history of slavery, emancipation, and race from the Civil War era through the early twentieth century. He is currently at work on a book about the place of the Fifteenth Amendment in American political culture and memory during the fifty years after its ratification. Prof. West is co-editor of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, series 3, volume 2, Land and Labor, 1866–1867 (2013), winner of the 2015 Thomas Jefferson Prize for documentary editing from the Society for History in the Federal Government. His first book, From Yeoman to Redneck in the South Carolina Upcountry, 1850–1920 (2008), examined class and political relations among white Southerners in the slave society of the Old South, and their transformation in the wake of slavery’s destruction. Prof. West is also the author of essays about the secession crisis, the historiography of Reconstruction, and urban politics in the post-emancipation South.
Julia Young:
Julia Young is a historian of migration, Mexico and Latin America, and Catholicism in the Americas. Her prize-winning book, Mexican Exodus: Emigrants, Exiles, and Refugees of the Cristero War (Oxford University Press, 2015), examines Mexican religious exiles, political refugees, and labor emigrants in the United States during Mexico’s Cristero war. She co-edited Local Church, Global Church: Catholic Activism in Latin America from Rerum Novarum to Vatican II (The Catholic University of America Press, 2015). She has published scholarly articles in The Americas, The Catholic Historical Review, Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, Modernism, and the Journal on Migration and Human Security. Dr. Young has been a fellow at the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, as well as the Institute for Policy Research at Catholic University. In 2020-2021, she was a fellow at the Luce/ACLS Program in Religion, Journalism & International Affairs. She is currently researching a new book about right-wing Catholicism in Mexico during the twentieth century, and she frequently writes for the media about immigration, border issues, and Catholic immigration history.