Mission

The mission of the Hill Center for World Studies is to raise our general level of world historical consciousness. Toward this end we focus on the historical study of empires since 1500 and we bring to your attention the insights offered by new scholarship.

The HCWS staff and its Working Group maintain this website. On it we post materials that we and our participating scholars have developed: curricular suggestions, short articles, annotated bibliographies and web links dealing with our current topic of inquiry. The material is intended for all students of history—and by students we mean not just scholars and teachers, but all (far from) 'ordinary' citizens, eager to understand and even to change the world, or at least the way we think about it.

As a teacher-scholar collaborative we have been in operation since 2000. We have now concluded our service aimed specifically at teachers, and as of 2009, we instead are producing 'virtual' workshops on this site. We do intend to sponsor an annual lecture and information about it will be published on the topic homepage. We continue to archive materials from some of the workshops we have presented on various college and university campuses since we began.

Our topic for the period 2009 -2010, is Empires: Science, Travel, Art. Please click here to go to the Empires: Science, Travel, Art home page.

The Empires project
2007-2010

The goal of this project is to pull together a vast amount of scholarship on empires and imperialism, produced over the past three decades, in order to help our audiences imagine the world through the imperial rubric. Click to go to Empires Homepage>