September 30
Empire and Toleration: Some Comparative Thoughts
Karen Barkey, Department of Sociology, Columbia University

October 28
Law, Crime and Sovereignty on the Hyderabad-Bombay Frontier
Eric Lewis Beverley, Department of History, SUNY-Stony Brook

November 18
Be a Shareholder in Victory! Financial Nationalism and the American Citizen Investor in World War I
Julia Cathleen Ott, Committee on Historical Studies, The New School for Social Research

All meetings in Wednesdays 12:50-2:10 pm in SBS N320.

See IHSS homepage for more information.

Today the Emmy nominations for News and Documentaries were released, and our own Jennifer Anderson is among the nominees.  She has been nominated under the category, “Outstanding Individual Achievement in a Craft:  Research,” for her work on the PBS documentary, “Traces of the Trade,” a study of the DeWolfe family’s Northern slave trade.  Jenny writes, “Dredging the dusty files of the Bristol Historical Society was not terribly glamorous at the time, but still what fun to be nominated.”  Congratulations for the nomination, Jenny, and we look forward to watching you walk down the red carpet on September 21st at Lincoln Center.

The Undergraduate Studies Committee has added a section called “Writing Resources” to the Undergraduate page of this website.  The link will bring you to a useful list of errors to avoid and also a directory of helpful websites.  Pay a visit and let us know what you think.

All events will take place at SBS (Social and Behavioral Sciences Building) N-318

FROYLÁN ENCISO
The Author as Bureaucrat: Debates around the Diplomatic Works of Octavio Paz and the Latin American Traveler-Writers
3/4 (W) 12:50 PM

JUAN PABLO ARTINIAN
Politics of Visual Representation in Argentina; State Power and Popular Creativity: Antonio Berni and Ricardo Carpani (1950-1963)
3/25 (W) 1:00pm

ARIE PERLIGER
Understanding the Politics of Counterterrorism – A Comparative Analysis
4/16 (Th) 2:20pm

TOM BALCERSKI & STEPHEN SANFILIPPO
“The Little Spark of Manhood I Have Left:” Ballads, Petitions, and the “Aged, Decrepit, and Worn-out Seamen” of Sailors’ Snug Harbor
4/22 (W) 1:00pm

JEFF HALL
Olympic Village or Prison Town?: Building the Federal Prison at Ray Brook, New York, 1975-1990
4/29 (W) 1:00pm

JANIS MIMURA
Technocratic Modernity: Planning, Empire, and the State in Wartime Japan
5/6 (W) 1:00pm

Time and location are subject to change.

Flyers including abstracts and more detailed info will be handed out one week prior to each meeting. Please feel free to print, copy, or distribute any of these.

To receive e-mail updates or for further information please contact Sung Yup Kim.

The State University of New York at Stony Brook, in cooperation with the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, will hold a conference in Stony Brook on March 20-21, 2009, on “The Worlds of Lion Gardiner, c. 1599-1663: Crossings and Boundaries.” Military man and engineer, chronicler and diplomat, lord of a New English manor married to a Dutch woman, Gardiner led a life replete with crossings: of the English Channel to engage in Continental wars, of the Atlantic, of the lesser waters of Long Island Sound, of national, imperial, and colonial borders, of racial divides, and of the very bounds of colonial law. The many crossings in which he and his contemporaries were involved did much to create boundaries between things previously less clearly separated.

Conference website, schedule, and other info

On-line Registration

The Social Studies Education web site has moved!  The new URL is http://history.sunysb.edu/sse/.

Please click here for this fall’s schedule of papers and speakers in this initiative. The series is a collaborative effort of the History and Sociology Departments at Stony Brook.

I am privileged to be the current Chair of the History Department at Stony Brook. Our program has achieved remarkable success over the past two decades. Our faculty have compiled an exceptional record of productivity, as measured in article and book publication; moreover, the quality of that work has been exceptional as well, reflected in the strong record of fellowship and grant support. Stony Brook faculty have received awards from virtually every major public and private foundation that supports history, from the National Science Foundation to the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center to the Wilson Center. Among the current faculty are four recent recipients of the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, a record that even our Ivy League counterparts have to envy.

This record of scholarship has not come at the cost of their teaching. The History Department has a strong culture of teaching excellence at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. The department now has almost 700 majors and minors, where it is one of the most popular humanities majors at the university. It also runs a large graduate program, awarding the MA, the MAT and the Ph.D. In the late 1990s, the department radically changed its graduate program to reflect a more comparative, thematic approach to graduate training. We have been in the vanguard of a more transnational approach to history, and our program is now being taken as a model by other universities.

At our last external review, our department was evaluated by a team of distinguished historians, and here’s what they had to say about us:

“Rankings are notoriously subjective, but the “buzz” about Stony Brook among academic historians in the United States is highly positive both in terms of the value and rigor of its graduate training program and the impact of its members’ scholarly work, the two factors that weigh most heavily in such impressionistic evaluations. Its historians have received major national fellowships and other awards that generally go to scholars at top-ranked universities; this record of national and international recognition confirms the widespread recognition of Stony Brook’s history faculty as in the very top tier. There is much to admire in both the program and the graduate student population, most notably the new design of the program which focuses on thematic or topical fields of specialization. Whereas most schools present only national or regional options for major fields, Stony Brook has worked to develop thematic fields based on the expertise and scholarly interests of its faculty and on the evolution of knowledge in the discipline itself.”

The History Department represents an ideal setting for studying history at any level. It is a department known not only for its scholarly achievement but also a strong tradition of collegeality. Our new website reflects those values as well. I hope you enjoy visiting it.

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, and other info

Registration

Link to the call for papers