The Department of History offers a vital and innovative course of study in Modern European history, a field which has been at the center of teaching and research at University of Illinois for over one hundred years. 

The program emphasizes comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives in addition to national area studies. Traditional strengths in British, German, and French history are complemented by research approaches that examine collective identities such as class, nation, and gender, collective memory, the organization of power and categories of culture, the formation of intellectual life, the uses of violence, the contours of everyday life and private life, colonial and postcolonial interactions, and the politics of representation. Recent courses focused on comparative topics: "Cities," "Memory and History," "History and Postcolonial Studies," "Europeans and Nature, 1750-1900," and "European Travellers in North America." 

Graduate students are encouraged to ground themselves in historical theory and methods, to gain teaching experience as assistants, and to undertake field research. Close collaboration binds modern Europeanists with their counterparts in allied  fields such as Russian history, East European history, British and Empire history, and Early Modern history as well as disciplines such as anthropology and comparative literature.  Students typically travel to Europe to pursue predissertation research at the end of their second year and formulate dissertation topics and apply for dissertation research grants in their third year. In the last years, graduate students at Illinois have regularly received predissertation grants from the Council for European Studies and dissertation grants from the Social Science Research Council and the German Academic Exchange Service.