Transnational History and the Historical Profession

           Practitioners of international, transnational, and global history have issued stirring manifestos urging the profession to overcome arbitrary boundaries that too often keep us apart and puzzle our students. New scholarship and trends in hiring suggest that these arguments are beginning to resonate. But rather than bringing together national and regional specialists, the new approaches have often proven divisive.            Most large history departments remain divided between Americanists, Europeanists, and “Otherists.” Area-based categories continue to define jobs, journals, fellowships, and prizes, and new historians ignore them at their peril. With the decline in the size of many Ph.D. programs, the scramble for students – and teaching assistants – has raised the stakes in debates over how to mentor the next generation. Many prospective graduate students wish to push the boundaries of national history, but lack the requisite languages and methodological training. While there are new and innovative ways to introduce undergraduates to world history, they are also more challenging for overworked instructors, and are therefore neglected. Notwithstanding recent events demonstrating the extent of interdependence across cultures – and the cost of mutual ignorance – debates about alternatives to national and nationalist history are confined to the Ivory Tower.            Zero-sum fights over faculty hires and graduate admissions can best be resolved by bringing in new resources, and that requires communicating the importance of these approaches beyond the academy. We need to acknowledge what could be lost if we neglect national historiographical traditions or area studies training and support innovative solutions, such as regional consortia. And as we create new structures to support our work – such as graduate programs, edited series, and research centers – we need to ensure that they really do help overcome fragmentation, and do not simply institutionalize a new kind of area specialization.