After the global turn (Hunt 2014), in what ways are the intellectual and pedagogical goals articulated as "the New World History" still relevant? A project to self-define world history as an innovative field that differentiated itself from established, Eurocentric modes of universal history coalesced in the U.S. with the founding of the World History Association in 1982. Research methods, theory, and historiography emerged in the pages of the Journal of World History, launched in 1990, articulating something called “world history” as practiced in the WHA and reflected in the JWH.

Scholars and teachers challenged Eurocentric, teleological, triumphalist narratives of Western Civ (McNeill 1963, Hodgson 1974), emphasized emancipatory possibilities of non-national histories (Bentley 2005), documented the shared humanity of all people, and situated humans on a planetary scale (Christian 1991). This movement, dubbed “the New World History” (Dunn 2000), shared motivations with anti-colonial politics and with calls to diversify the subjects and practice of history. TNWH also dovetailed with a national shift in US schools from Western Civ to world history and stirred the pot of the culture wars (Nash, Crabtree & Dunn 2000). The field has not, however, attracted many scholars who prioritize race and diversity.

The field leans heavily into political-economy. Despite objections to this weight and serious attempts to develop global social and cultural histories (Colley 2007, Pomeranz 2007, Wiesner-Hanks 2007, Burton & Ballantyne 2016), TNWH reflects persistent concerns with economic production, exchange, and state formation (Pomeranz 2000, Bentley 2011, Northrop 2012, Wiesner-Hanks 2015, Dunn, Mitchell, & Ward 2016). Critics identified the limitations of a continued capitalist orientation, reinforcing imperial power—implicitly or explicitly—as a driving force, and the epistemological impossibility of escaping professional history’s disciplinary roots in nineteenth-century Europe (Chakrabarty 2000, Cooper 2001, Lal 2005, Dirlik 2005).

Institutional leadership is a fallible proxy for the contours of a discipline but serves as a marker to start conversation. When Ken Pomeranz was elected president of the AHA (2013), there hadn’t been a self-identified world historian in that role since William McNeill in 1985. Pomeranz was followed quickly by Pat Manning (2016) and John McNeill (2019), with Tyler Stovall—a globally inclined scholar who was not active in WHA conversations—serving in 2017. In this context, do we still need the self-identified aspects of TNWH?

This roundtable’s participants include decision makers in world history, those who’ve actively promoted world history within the discipline (Pomeranz 2016), and scholars whose work looks familiar to world historians but isn’t always explicitly framed as such. They ask how important it is to continue to differentiate world history from other transregional scholarship, or from other large-scale inquiry. Is world history, like environmental history and climate change, part of the general conversation now that everybody can say anthropocene?

The roundtable will open with a general introduction followed by five-minute statements from each panelist about why identifying as a world historian has—or has not—been important to their intellectual and professional trajectory (approx. 30 minutes). The chair will then pose questions, integrating questions from the audience throughout the remaining hour.