- Program Overview
- About CHI Students
- Admission
- Contemporary History Fellowships & Financial Aid
- Courses
Program Overview
The Ohio University Contemporary History Institute, created in 1987, offers a unique course of interdisciplinary study, mainly on the graduate level, that trains students to apply historical perspectives in analyzing recent events and contemporary policy issues. The Institute is centered in the Department of History, but it also draws faculty and students from the departments of Economics and Political Science, the E. W. Scripps School of Journalism, and the Honors Tutorial College.
The Institute does not, in itself, grant degrees. Instead, it offers a Certificate in Contemporary History, which serves as an adjunct to the M.A. and Ph.D. programs in history, the M.A. degrees in economics and political science, the M.S. degree in journalism, and the Ph.D. degree in mass communications.
Students receive the Institute's certificate after successfully completing a sequence of interdisciplinary CHI seminars and tutorials focusing on methodologies, themes, and issues in contemporary history, and after writing a thesis or dissertation on a contemporary history topic that meets the requirements of the student's degree-granting department.
The Contemporary History certificate, when combined with a traditional graduate degree in history, political science, economics, or journalism, opens a wide range of career opportunities for students interested in the application of history to current problems. Among the most important are employment in academia, government, journalism, telecommunications, business, and law. Students earning the certificate with the M.A. or M.S. degree are also in a strong position to pursue further graduate education at the doctoral level at Ohio University or elsewhere.
View Courses & Requirements in the Official Academic Catalog
About CHI Students
The Contemporary History Institute admits approximately between 12 and 15 new students each year. These students are selected on a highly competitive basis from a national and international pool of applicants; they are admitted to the Institute only after having been accepted for study in one of the Institute's affiliated departments.
During the past several years, the Institute has attracted students from such U.S. institutions as the University of Chicago, Columbia University, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, the George Washington University, the University of Georgia, the University of Illinois, the University of Kansas, the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Notre Dame University, the Ohio State University, Princeton University, Rutgers University, Stanford University, Temple, the University of Texas at Austin, Vanderbilt University, and the University of Washington.
Students from the Bahamas, Bulgaria, Canada, China, Croatia, Denmark, France, Georgia, Germany, Great Britain, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Kenya, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Russia, Serbia, South Korea, Singapore, Switzerland, and Zimbabwe also have been accepted into the program.
Usually about one-fourth of the Institute's students are from countries other than the United States.