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Eberly College of Arts & Sciences Department of History
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Research and Collaboration

The History Department is staffed by leading scholars and teachers, who engage in award-winning research and teaching, who collaborate with community partners, and who guide research opportunities for students.

Explore our research clusters

Scholarship in the Department of History is driven by a passion for understanding the present by studying historical context and historical literacy. We conduct impactful research across four primary focus areas: 

Gender and Kinship

Examine how women, men, children, and kin groups encountered labor, law, religion, property, and other phenomena.

Imperial and Post-Colonial Societies

Examine ways colonial empires transformed, exchanged, hybridized, or were resisted by societies around the globe.

Labor and Political Economy

Explore the interaction of politics with consumption, technology, economic policy making and markets.

War and Society

Research various chronological and geographical contexts to understand the reciprocal relationships between society and mass violence.

A focus on women in Appalachia underscores that the region has long been a site of struggle where women identified the sources of misery in their lives, imagined new possibilities, and struggled to remake their communities, and thus American society.

Female with tortoise shell glasses, medium length brown hair

Jessica Wilkerson

Associate Professor
Stuart and Joyce Robbins Distinguished Chair of History
Andrew Carnegie Fellows Program, 2021-2023

Meet Dr. Wilkerson

Photo of labor organizer Mother Jones speaking to a gathering of well dressed  adults and children in a ballpark in Montgomery, W. Va. on August 4, 1912. Photo credit WV History OnView