Secondary fields offer students an opportunity to cultivate expertise in a particular methodology or in a geographical region outside their primary field. They also provide the option of transcending national and regional borders altogether. In all instances, students are encouraged to work with faculty outside of their primary field and may even choose to work with faculty in a different discipline or in one of MSU’s studies programs, such as African American and African Studies, American Indian and Indigenous Studies Chicano/Latino Studies, and Muslim Studies. In this way, students are able to take full advantage of faculty strengths that cluster around thematic interests as much as geographic ones and that cut across departments.
Graduate students at Michigan State also have the opportunity to develop their program with a significant digital history component.
Possible secondary fields include:
- Atlantic World
- Socialist and Communist Studies
- Comparative Black
- Comparative Islam
- Digital History
- Early Modern World
- Intellectual History
- International Labor and Working Class
- Mediterranean World
- Migration
- History of Religion
- Sports
- Urban History