Currently active workshops in History and related fields:
African History & Anthropology
The Africa History and Anthropology Workshop (AHAW) is graduate students and faculty with a shared interest in the study of Africa and the African Diaspora. We meet throughout the school year to discuss pre-circulated papers and grant proposals written by graduate students, faculty, and invited guests. Scholars from all disciplines are encouraged to join us. Since Fall 2010, AHAW has been coordinated to meet on alternating Tuesdays with the Africa Workshop lecture series, sponsored by the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies.
American History
Now in its fifteenth year, the American History Workshop (AHW) is a forum designed by and for all graduate students, in any discipline, who study American history, broadly defined. The AHW welcomes anyone engaged in historical inquiry to present or offer comment during our writing workshops, professionalization events, workshops with visiting scholars and our annual spring graduate conference. The AHW seeks to meet the intellectual, social, and professional needs of graduate students looking to advance interdisciplinary thought about our American past.
Environmental History
The Environmental History Interest group is a venue for graduate students and faculty from a wide-range of departments to discuss both recent scholarship and their own contributions to the diverse field of environmental history. Adopting a broad geographical, chronological, and thematic scope, the EHIG aims to provide a forum for its members to engage in the kind of interdisciplinary conversations that are essential for pushing research in new directions. Reading groups and writing workshops provide sites for discussing recent work on environmental history and challenge graduate students and faculty members to engage and experiment with unfamiliar theories and methods in a supportive, informal context.
European History
The European History RIW provides a venue for students engaged in various fields related to Europe, across chronological and geographical, and disciplinary boundaries.
Forum on Research in Medieval Studies
The Forum on Research in Medieval Studies (FoRMS) serves as a structure for the Medieval Lunch series and graduate student reading groups. Graduate students and faculty in various departments who study the art, culture, literature, history, and social forms of premodernity participate regularly in this RIW. In its geographical, historical, and disciplinary scope, FoRMS offers a forum for graduate students and faculty to consider the contributions their work makes to the broad field of medieval studies. FoRMS activities, particularly the Medieval Lunch series, serve as a complement to the intellectual life of the program in Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS).
Law & Society
Legal studies, as an interdisciplinary field, offers a framework to examine how law affects culture, politics, and economics, and how those things also affect law. The Law & Society RIW was founded to provide formal legal studies scholars and other researchers whose topics engage with the law the opportunity to discuss their work among themselves and with leading scholars in the field. The Law & Society RIW holds monthly student workshops and hosts visiting scholars several times a year.
Migration & Displacement
University of Michigan faculty and graduate students who research migration, displacement, asylum, and exile are scattered across the university, with few opportunities to engage each other’s ideas and methodologies in a shared institutional home. The Migration & Displacement RIW enables them to share concepts, methods, and innovative work regarding the politics of people on the move. This workshop serves as a space for building common vocabularies and theoretical frameworks for studying human mobility, efforts to enable or restrict it, and processes of settling in new locales. With its strong public engagement component, the workshop also tries to push the limits of academic knowledge production and transcend the boundaries between scholarly and community-based work.
Religion in the Early Modern Atlantic
Religion in the Early Modern Atlantic World is a group whose work grapples with religion – broadly defined – in Africa, the Americas, and/or Europe, from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. To facilitate interdisciplinary connections, we regularly host professionalization seminars, workshops featuring the research of faculty and graduate students, a reading group on early modern witchcraft entitled “Thinking with Demons,” and more. In the winter semester, we also host an interdisciplinary conference highlighting the work of faculty, graduate students, and an invited speaker.
Science and Technology Studies
The Science and Technology Studies reading group meetings provide the opportunity to delve more deeply into some of the core topics in contemporary STS — such as expertise and classification — and to explore additional topics such as risk, environmentalism, development, and globalization. Our workshops expose scholarly works-in-progress to constructive critique and discussion, and our mini-seminars and lunch conversations give graduate students a chance to interact with STS scholars from around the world.
Here are other RIWs in which History grad students are active:
Critical Ethnic and Asian Pacific Islander American Studies
Transnational Gender and Sexuality Studies
You can see a complete list of all Rackham Interdisciplinary Workshops here.
