Department of History

Taking oceans, rather than nations or empires, as key units for historical study focuses attention on the movement of people, ideas and commodities across space, and the political and cultural formations that emerge from these circulations. This course will accordingly consider several different stages of globalization from antiquity to the present along [...]

Check out the following coverage of a joint effort by Stony Brook faculty and leaders and residents of the small suburban town of Port Jefferson, NY, to “Green Port Jefferson.” Page 12 details an effort to study Port Jefferson’s carbon footprint, led by Chris Sellers of the History Department, and Jessica Gurevitch, of the Department [...]

Please feel free to visit the website for the conference I recently convened at Stony Brook, along with University of Exeter’s Joseph Melling, December 13-15, 2008, on “Dangerous Trade: Histories of Industrial Hazard Across a Globalizing World.”
Among the results of the conference are a planned edited volume, as well as a proposal for a Code [...]

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Mark your calendars for two major conference being sponsored by the History Department in 2008-2009.
I. “Cosmopolis 18th Century in the Age of Sail”
Stony Brook Manhattan October 23 and October 24, 2008
Schedule, Abstracts, Bios of Main Speakers

II. “The Worlds of Lion Gardiner, c. 1599-1663: Crossings and Boundaries”
Stony Brook, New York, March 20-21, 2009
Conference site, schedule, [...]

Within the thematic and cross-national emphasis of the history doctorate at Stony Brook, Latin American history remains a thriving area concentration. Indeed, Stony Brook is recognized as one of the country’s top Ph.D. training centers in Latin American history. Since 1990, Stony Brook has awarded more than two dozen doctorates in [...]

Popular perceptions and representations of Islam and Muslims are often founded on ignorance and outright prejudice.  Fundamental to these understandings are narrow and highly politicized notions of history, frequently accepted uncritically.  Accordingly, this course seeks first to introduce analytical approaches crucial to developing nuanced understandings of historical and contemporary depictions of Islam and Muslims.  In [...]

This course will provide an advanced introduction to South Asian history and historiography from the early modern period to the present. We will cover major works on key themes, including precolonial cultural relations, colonialism and imperialism, the politics of religious identity, anti-colonialism and nationalism, decolonization and partition, and postcolonial developments. Readings of classics [...]

Coming to grips with the twentieth century started early and is a historical challenge that will probably stimulate interesting responses for a long time. This seminar will explore some of the first exemplary efforts to “understand” that pivotal century:
Barraclough, Geoffrey. An introduction to contemporary history. New York: Basic Books, 1964.
Von [...]

This course surveys American history from the end of Reconstruction in 1877 to the end of the Cold War in the early 1990’s. It explores the consequences of a federal victory in the Civil War and the incomplete reconstruction that followed in shaping the emergence of a distinctly American state [...]