American Historical Association

131st Annual Meeting (January 5-8, 2017)

January 05 - 08, 2017

The preparation of doctoral dissertations based on historical research at the world-historical level has taken place for over two decades now, and this genre of graduate study is gradually advancing in strength and clarify. The literature on world history is expanding in its volume and in its reception by readers, but most world-historical studies are by senior scholars and many of them rely principally on secondary sources. For the writers of world-historical dissertations, the task is to develop a research design relying principally on primary data with world-historical implications, and to develop and confirm a world-historical argument in the course of the normal period of writing a dissertation. The authors of the four studies presented in this session—two with completed PhDs and two at ABD status—address a range of topics and regions over the past 500 years. The topics include exploring historical inequality in the Caribbean, interpreting the visual portrayal of Catholicism through images of St. Francis Xavier, an intellectual and cultural history of Arab communists in the interwar years, and the development of francophone networks of human-rights activists in the post-colonial era.