The Early Modern World represents a thematic focus within the Corcoran Department of History, cutting across conventional geographic fields. Faculty associated with this focus reflect the newly expansive scholarship on the period between the late 15th and the late 18th centuries. No longer a geographically- bounded term, “Early Modern” refers to a conceptual and historiographical framework for understanding large, interconnected processes that function simultaneously at local, translocal, and global levels. Our faculty have expertise ranging across Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. We are committed to the idea that scholarship and teaching should reflect this breadth and express an ecumenical spirit of intellectual collaboration across what were once regarded as historiographical divides.

Between the late 14th and the late 18th centuries powerful forces shook the world. For much of the last several decades, historians of Europe told the story of these centuries in terms of new attitudes toward texts and nature, of discovery and global expansion, of challenges to the Catholic church’s authority, of warfare over convictional differences, of emergent sovereign states, of changes in economic production and exchange, and of novel political arrangements. In effect, the history of the Early Modern Period was the account of Europe’s early modernization. Historians of Europe have sharply challenged and given nuance to this story, emphasizing the variability of circumstances and the crosss-cutting aspects of change and continuity. More recently, historians of Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and the Americas, have focused attention on conquest and colonialism, reciprocal cultural, material, and intellectual flows, the social and economic implications of slavery, hybridities and baroque juxtapositions, the relationship between empire and nation, and the encounter between mutual “others” as part and parcel of a broader tableau of the Early Modern. As these two scholarly streams have converged, a new and more cosmopolitan understanding of the period between 1500 and 1800 has begun to take shape.