Giving

UCLA’s History Department is one of the most highly acclaimed in the nation, with a faculty internationally renowned as teachers and scholars. It is also one of the larger History departments in the United States, with over 50 faculty, more than 700 majors and over 100 graduate students in residence. The popular Minor in History was inaugurated in Winter 2017 and now numbers over 200 students, many of whom are majoring in the STEM disciplines.

During the past five years, UCLA history professors have published over 60 books, garnering 29 prizes for their writing. Our faculty continue to win prestigious prizes awarded by the international community, including the Dan David Prize (housed at Tel Aviv University), the Sarton Medal (the highest award of the History of Science Society), and the International Prize of History from the International Committee of Historical Sciences (ICHS) .

In 2019, U.S historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez joined Professor Emeritus Saul Friedlander in an elite group of historians awarded a MacArthur Fellowship – the “genius award.” In the past decade, ten members of the faculty were honored with a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, while nine active UCLA professors are among the 250 historians elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The UCLA Department of History was rated the ninth best graduate program in history by U.S. News and World Report in 2017, and internationally placed tenth of World University Rankings. This is particularly impressive since UCLA is the “youngest” among the ranks of elite research universities.

The department’s faculty garnered several awards closer to home as well. In the past five years, three historians have been awarded UCLA’s highest teaching honor, the Distinguished Teaching Award, and another three faculty members have been asked to deliver the notable UCLA Faculty Research Lecture.

Yet the department has not achieved this prestige by neglecting our undergraduates. Senior faculty teach freshman survey courses, and every history major has the opportunity to take two or more small seminars. In the past five years, UCLA awarded degrees to an average of 335 undergraduate History majors each year. We are proud that so many UCLA students find history an attractive major and minor, and that many others take History electives: the annual average of undergraduates taking history courses numbers over 14,500.