**The IIS Global History Seminar is returning in Fall 2026. Details will be posted on the IIS news and events pages and announced to the IIS mailing list.
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.
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.
