ASU’s history program offers a vibrant intellectual community where students and faculty collaboratively explore the past. We offer degree options for undergraduate and graduate students, as well as several certificate programs, both online and at our Tempe campus.
History students have the opportunity to learn from internationally-recognized faculty members about a wide variety of times, places and topics. They can also participate in internships, research experiences and public history projects. Our expert instructors help students build skills that employers value, launching careers in government, teaching, law, business, museums and so much more.
We invite you to learn more about history at ASU to discover how we can jumpstart your education.
History Faculty Spotlights
Sexual Violence Against Holocaust Survivors After WWII
Associate Professor Anna Cichopek-Gajraj and her colleagues' work, "Shattered Liberation: Sexualized Violence Against Holocaust Survivors, 1943–1946" (Purdue Univ. Press) was published in December 2025.
"Shattered Liberation" is the first edited volume entirely devoted to the sexualized violence endured by Holocaust survivors at the hands of the Soviet Army and other perpetrators during the post–WWII “liberation” period. The volume explores in detail a wide range of difficult and often overlooked experiences.
Jews who saved Jews
Graduate student Katie Kloberdanz and Associate Professor Volker Benkert investigate the story of the Loewy family from Phoenix, who saved 1,500 Jews and non-Jews from a camp in Southern France.
Exploiting a loophole in Vichy’s anti-Jewish laws, the Loewy family managed to secure their own release and that of 1,500 people from Camp d’Agde. Later they joined the French resistance fighting alongside non-Jews. The project draws attention to Jews who saved others during the Holocaust by exploring the networks of Jews and non-Jews that enabled this extraordinary story of rescue and resistance.
Advising the Nation's Policymakers
Clinical Associate Professor Victoria Jackson shares her expertise as a historian of American college sports and the International Olympic Movement to shape U.S. sports policy.
Her ideas have been introduced in state and federal legislation, filed in support of legal cases in federal courtrooms, and circulated and supported by leaders in higher education and big-time college sports. Jackson writes op-eds and policy white papers, and she has testified on Capitol Hill twice.
The Slaughter of the Shags
Associate Professor Toby Harper explores the strange history of cormorant extermination in Australasia.
Between the 1860s and the 1980s anglers and rangers in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand killed hundreds of thousands of native animals in order to protect introduced trout. They were especially violent towards Phalacrocorax carbo, called the black cormorant in Australia and the black shag/kawau in New Zealand. Harper shows how violence against these birds reiterated settler colonial claims to control over the environment.
Questioning Infinite Economic Growth
Associate Professor Christopher Jones asks how we can reconcile economic growth with planetary sustainability in his book "The Invention of Infinite Growth”.
Economic growth places tremendous environmental stress on planetary systems already under duress. Jones shows that studying the history of economics reveals that we have not always imagined infinite growth to be possible or desirable. Other ways of thinking about economic futures can do a better job of building good lives and protecting the environment that sustains human life.
Medieval Slavery and Law
Associate Professor Hannah Barker studies slavery as a legal status in medieval Italy.
Slavery was organized somewhat differently in medieval Europe than in the modern Atlantic world. Enslaved people came from a variety of backgrounds and became enslaved in various ways. The archives of Genoa, a city in northern Italy, preserve freedom suits in which enslaved people challenged their status and claimed freedom because they had been made slaves in illegal ways.
Political exiles as collaborators or freedom fighters?
Associate Professor Laurie Manchester organized and spoke at a roundtable discussing how Russian refugees, displaced by the 1917 communist take-over, reacted to the Nazi invasion of the U.S.S.R. in June 1941.
During the November 2025 roundtable in Washington, DC, each of the four panelists, specialists on Russian exiles in different countries, discussed how conditions in the host countries and the degree of contact the exiles had with the Soviet Union before the war affected whether they supported the Nazis as a means to defeat their Bolshevik foes.