List of University of Chicago Alumni - Historians

Historians

• Allan Berube (X. 1968) - Founder of the San Francisco Gay and Lesbian History Project, now the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society; author of Coming Out Under Fire (1990) ; MacArthur Fellow (1996).
• Constance B. Bouchard (A.M. 1973, Ph.D. 1976) - Distinguished Professor of Medieval History at the University of Akron; Guggenheim Fellow (1995) and Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America.
• Antoinette Burton (A.M. 1984, Ph.D. 1990) - Catherine A. and Bruce C. Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies and Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
• Henry Steele Commager (Ph.B. 1923, A.M. 1924, Ph.D. 1928) - noted American historian.
• Avery Craven (Ph.D. 1923) - Professor of History; Civil War expert.
• Angie Debo (A.M. 1924, international relations) - Oklahoma and Native American history, author of And the Waters Still Run: The Betrayal of the Five Civilized Tribes (1940).
• Nicholas Dirks (A.M. 1974, Ph.D. 1981) - Franz Boas Professor of History and Anthropology; Vice-President for Arts and Sciences at Columbia University.
• Lawrence M. Friedman (A.B. 1948, J.D. 1951, LL.M. 1953) - Marion Rice Kirkwood Professor of Law at Stanford Law School; legal historian and author of Crime and Punishment in American History.
• David Fromkin (A.B. 1950, J.D. 1953) - University Professor of International Relations, History, and Law at Boston University.
• Stéphane Gerson (A.M. 1992, Ph.D. 1997) - Associate Professor of French and French Studies, New York University; Laurence Wylie Prize in French Cultural Studies (best book published 2003-05) and Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History (year’s most distinguished book in American or European cultural history) for The Pride of Place: Local Memories and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century France (2003); Co-editor of Why France? American Historians Reflect on an Enduring Fascination (2007).
• Dena Goodman (A.M. 1978, Ph.D. 1982) - Lila Miller Collegiate Professor of History and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan; Guggenheim Fellow (2006).
• Anthony Grafton (A.B. 1971, A.M. 1972, Ph.D. 1975) - Prominent Renaissance historian and Henry Putnam University Professor at Princeton University.
• Gertrude Himmelfarb (Ph.D. 1950) - National Humanities Medal (2004); Professor Emeritus of History at the City University of New York.
• Kenneth T. Jackson (A.M. 1963, Ph.D. 1966) - Jacques Barzun Professor of History and the Social Sciences at Columbia University.
• Russell Jacoby (S.M. 1978) - Professor in Residence at Department of History, University of California, Los Angeles; author of The Last Intellectuals (1987).
• Mark Edward Lewis (A.B. 1977, A.M. 1979, Ph.D. 1985) - Kwoh-Ting Li Professor in Chinese Culture, Department of History, Stanford University.
• Walter A. McDougall (A.M., 1971, Ph.D. 1974) - Professor of History and Alloy-Ansin Professor of International Relations, University of Pennsylvania; Pulitzer Prize Winner (1986).
• William Hardy McNeill (A.B. 1938, A.M. 1939) - Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Chicago; author of The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (1963).
• Saul K. Padover (Ph.D., 1932) - Historian and political scientist at the New School for Social Research in New York City
• Richard Anthony Parker (Ph.D. 1938) - Charles Edwin Wilbour Professor of Egyptology at Brown University; director of the University of Chicago’s epigraphic survey studying the mortuary temple of Ramses III.
• Rick Perlstein (B.A. 1992) - Author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America and Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus
• Vijay Prashad (A.M. 1990, Ph.D. 1994) - George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History and Professor of International Studies, Trinity College; author of The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World (2007).
• Francesca Rochberg (Ph.D. 1980) - Catherine and William L. Magistretti Distinguished Professor of Near Eastern Studies, University of California, Berkeley; MacArthur Fellow (1982).
• Barbara H. Rosenwein (Ph.D. 1974) - Professor of Medieval History and Chair of the Department of History, Loyola University of Chicago; Guggenheim Fellow (1991) and author of numerous books, including To Be the Neighbor of Saint Peter: The Social Meaning of Cluny's Property, 909-1049 (Cornell University Press, 1989), Negotiating Space: Power, Restraint, and Privileges of Immunity in Early Medieval Europe (Cornell UP, 1999), and Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Cornell UP, 2006).
• Eileen Southern (A.B. 1940, Ph.D. 1941) - National Humanities Medal (2001); first African-American female professor at Harvard University.
• Studs Terkel (Ph.B. 1932, J.D. 1934) - Oral historian and radio host; Pulitzer Prize winner for the Good War: An Oral History of World War II (1985); National Humanities Medal (1997).
• Gerhard Weinberg (A.M. 1949, Ph.D. 1951) - Historian, World War Two expert; William R. Kenan Jr. Professor Emeritus of History, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
• Carter G. Woodson (A.B. 1908, A.M. 1908) - Historian and founder of Negro History Week (1926), which evolved into Black History Month; civil rights activist.
• Richard S. Wortman (A.M. 1960, Ph.D. 1964) - Bryce Professor of European Legal History, Columbia University; pioneering historian of imperial Russian history; 2007 Award for Distinguished Contributions to Slavic Studies, American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies.