Postmodern historiography designates an array of approaches to historical inquiry that eschew modern historiographical assumptions. Modern historiographical assumptions rejected by postmodern historiography include teleology, coherence, totalizing (or “grand”) narratives, determinism, progress, truth, realism, objectivity, universality, and essentialism. Postmodern historio-graphical approaches have been described variously as counterhistory, metahistory, critical and effective history, new historicism, and new cultural history. Postmodern historiography is exemplified most notably in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Hayden White, and Stephen Greenblatt.

Postmodern historiography is relevant to curriculum studies for its influences on curriculum history and its contributions to theories of knowledge, particularly with respect to purposes of inquiry, foci of study, and epistemological commitments.