Graduate Information:

Graduate

Ph.D. Program

Modern South Asia

The Tufts History Department has a distinguished tradition of offering doctoral training in Modern South Asian history. Successful Ph.D candidates have gone on to obtain positions in some of the most prestigious institutions of American academe. The program provides doctoral students with an ambience geared to intense and focused research into the most pressing questions of South Asian scholarship today, while also connecting students to the larger international expertise of the Tufts History Faculty, as well as the resources of the Tufts Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Students in this major field also partake of the active intellectual life surrounding South Asian studies in the Boston area, including the Center for South Asian and Indian Ocean Studies.

The Modern South Asia Ph.D immerses students in both the breadth and the detail of a complex arena of historical inquiry. Students study local and regional specificities, and also the large-scale political, economic, social, cultural and intellectual interactions that have made South Asia a nexus for globalizing forces in the modern period.

Focus is placed on building expert skills in historical reasoning and analysis, in good writing and exposition, and in historiographic theory and debates.

Students who enter the Ph.D. program in Modern South Asian history at Tufts secure themselves a place in a scholarly tradition that has significantly influenced academic discussions in the United States and abroad by the formulation of new themes and heuristic categories, and by the impressive caliber of its work.

Additional requirements for Ph.D. in Modern South Asian History:

• Language requirements: English, at least one major South Asian language, and one other appropriate language
• Primary field of concentration: Nineteenth-and twentieth-century South Asia
• Secondary geographic field: An appropriate field in the history of the Middle East, East Africa, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, or East Asia
• Thematic field: An appropriate interdisciplinary and comparative field in topics such as nationalism, agrarian or labor history, world history

Global History

Global History begins with the premise that the world is an interconnected system. Our commitment to interdisciplinarity, cross-cultural studies, non-Western perspectives, and comparative approaches provides a context within which students can conduct research across and beyond the nation-state frame. Please contact the Director of Graduate Studies.