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Research and Collaboration

Our faculty and students are leading cutting-edge research on the history of our world and providing a foundation for Humanities scholarship at West Virginia University.

Scholarship in the Department of History draws from many areas of historical expertise. While the following foci do not cover all areas of research, they provide an example of the interests of our faculty and 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.

: Gender and Kinship

Imperial and Post-Colonial Societies

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

: Imperial and Post-Colonial Societies

Labor and Political Economy

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

: Labor and Political Economy

War and Society

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

: War and Society

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

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