Global History Seminar

The IIS Global History Seminar is returning in Fall 2026!

The seminar is co-hosted by Matt Schutzer and Rebecca Herman, both professors of history at UC Berkeley.

Join the Global History Seminar's Google Group.

Fall 2026 speakers:

  • Prof. Samantha Iyer, Fordham University  | Agrarian Superpower: Food, Development, and the Global Ascendancy of the United States

  • Prof. Matt O’Hara, UC Santa Cruz  |  The Flying Death: Poison, Plunder, and the Quest for a Miracle Medicine in the Amazon


  • Prof. Mary Mitchell, New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers Newark  |  Unsettling Sovereignty: International Law, Nuclear Weapons, and US Extraterritorial Power in Postwar Oceania

Global History Seminar Background

Global history, as this seminar's conveners define it, is history attuned to global interconnections and interdependencies of diverse kinds; is history that operates at multiple scales, ranging from the local to the regional to the planetary; and is history that transgresses, and critically probes, the borders that define and demarcate the histories of nation-states. Past presentations showcase the array of themes and topics that global history may comprise.

From Sven Beckert on cotton and David Christian on "Big History" to Julie Greene on the Panama Canal and Jennifer Van Vleck on Pan-Am; from Charles Maier on the making of the territorial state to Francis Fukuyama on the decay of political institutions, the Global History Seminar has featured a broad array of presenters and presentations.

The normal practice of the Global History is to feature work in progress. The seminar began in 2010 under the leadership of Professor Brian DeLay and Daniel Sargent.

The pre-circulation of written drafts to participants enables the seminar to devote entire sessions to substantive discussion and debate, from which we and our guests benefit. The diversity of expertise among regular seminar participants, whose interests range across regions, periods, and themes, yields conversations that orient towards the conceptual premises and comparative implications of research. While a preponderance of participants are historians, the Global History Seminar welcomes presenters and participants from diverse disciplinary and methodological backgrounds.

Topics

Historians topic page

Past Events

Fall 2021

October 14, 2021
“The Caravan of Death: Women, Refugee Camps, & Family Separations in the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands."”
Professor Verónica Castillo-Muñoz

Fall 2018 – Spring 2019

September 20, 2018
“Borderlands and Border Crossings in the Nineteenth-Century World”
Samuel Truett (University of New Mexico, Alburquerque)

Fall 2017 – Spring 2018

November 16, 2017
“Is it a good idea to try to teach the history of everything?”
David Christian (Macquarie University)

April 10, 2018
“The Value of Space: Geopolitics, Geography and the Search for International Theory in the United States in the 1950s"
Or Roseboim (City University of London)

April 11, 2018
“Torture and Human Rights since 1945"
Barbara Keys (University of Melbourne)

Fall 2016 – Spring 2017

October 12, 2016
"The Geopolitics of Mobility: Immigration and U. S. Global Power in the Long 20th Century" 
Paul Kramer (Vanderbuilt University)

October 26, 2016 
"Imperfect Strangers: Americans, Arabs, and U.S.-Middle East Relations in the 1970s"
Salim Yaqub (University of California, Santa Barbara)

February 8, 2017
"The Strange Career of William Ellis"
Karl Jacoby (Columbia University)

February 16, 2017
"The Spanish Civil War and Pinochet's Chile"
Kirsten Weld (Harvard University)

March 23, 2017
“Hidden Fronts: The Crash of the Yankee Clipper and American Paths into World War II”
Brooke Blower (Boston University)

Fall 2015 – Spring 2016

November 12, 2015
“Wilson’s Curse: Communalism, Nationalism, and the End of Empire in the Short Unhappy Lives of Postwar Federations” 
Jason Parker (Texas A&M University)

February 20, 2016
"Archipelago Capitalism: Tax Havens, Money Markets, and the Shadow Economy, 1920s-1980"
Vanessa Ogle (University of Pennsylvania)

March 10, 2016
"Steaming Towards Borneo: Joseph Conrad and the Maritime World of Southeast Asia"
Maya Jasanoff (Harvard University)

Fall 2014 – Spring 2015

September 29, 2014 
"The History Manifesto"
David Armitage (Harvard University) and Jo Guldi (Brown University)

April 21, 2015
"Our Sister Republics: The United States in an Age of American Revolutions"
Caitlin Fitz (Northwestern University)

April 30, 2015"Stealing Electricity, Refrigerating Pork: Muslim Scruples and Qualms in the Transnational Labor for God and Mammon"
Leor Halevi (Vanderbilt University)

May 21, 2015
Kyle Harper (University of Oklahoma)

Fall 2013 – Spring 2014

April 17, 2014
Michael Morgan (University of North Carolina)

Fall 2012 – Spring 2013

October 29, 2012
Erika Lee (University of Minnesota)

November 15, 2012 2011
"The Origins of Political Order"
Francis Fukuyama (Stanford University)

Fall 2011 – Spring 2012

September 6, 2011
"Globalism: The Origins of a Geopolitical Keyword"
Nils Gilman (Practitioner)

November 3, 2011
"Once Within Borders"
Charles Maier (Harvard University)

November 8, 2011
Lisa Ford (University of New South Wales)

March 6, 2012
"No Distant Places: Aviation and the Global American Century" 
Jennifer Van Vleck (Yale University)

Fall 2010 – Spring 2011

November 16, 2010
Sven Beckert (Harvard University)

March 3 , 2011
Kristin Hoganson (University of Illinois)

April 12, 2011
"Facing South: Latin America, the United States, and the Socialization and de-Socialization of Liberalism.”
Greg Grandin (New York University)

April 26, 2011
"Utopian Empire: The United States, Panama, and Visions of Global Power"
Julie Greene (University of Maryland)