btpp

Studying the history of ideas in a history department will require that you become a specialist in a particular time and place. If you are coming from a philosophy department, you are likely to be either an early modern Europeanist, a late modern Europeanist, or an Americanist. Within these fields, you will find a variety of approaches to the study of ideas. Most but not all intellectual historians are interested to some extent in how the study of ideas can tell us something about the wider society that generated them--i.e. what can studying Hegel tell us about Germany during his day--or ideas that are directly and immediately relevant to the issues (e.g. race, class, gender, pwr, religion) that most historians studying. At least within the fields of Europe and the US, a minority of intellectual historians are purely interested in the ideas with little regard to their context or what they can can reveal about that context. It is possible, depending on your advisor, to study the history of ideas in a way more closely aligned with the practice of philosophy; however, most historians will not care about such an approach, making selling yourself on the job market difficult and subjecting you while in grad school to the non-comprehension or derision of professors and peers whose sense of what it important to study is much different than your own. In US history, for instance, there are almost never jobs in intellectual history, and when there are jobs, they are much more likely to go to someone who studies ideas that non-intellectual historians will consider relevant to understanding society--say, ideas about gender rather than the history of Anglo-American analytic philosophy. One one hand, grad school is what you make of the options it gives you. On the other hand, disciplines discipline you. Studying ideas in the context of a history department will likely (depending on advisor, etc) give you a fundamentally different approach than studying them in philosophy; you can take alternative approaches, but you will be disciplined by your peers, your professors, and the job market.