Department of History

By now, it has become widely accepted that History (with a capital H) was deeply implicated in naturalizing the territorially delimited nation-state as one of the fundamental categories of historical analysis and narration. This recognition of the radical historicity of their own disciplinary knowledge is leading many historians to take the “transnational turn.” Despite the [...]

This Theme Seminar, intended primarily for aspiring Ph.D. students from any regional concentration or discipline, explores the history of what anthropologist Sidney Mintz calls the “food-drugs”–sugar, tobacco, coffee, alcohol, betel, chocolate, yerba mate, coca and the like.  It examines their creation as commodities and their powerful historical contributions to colonialism, capitalism and modernity.  More [...]

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 [...]

This seminar takes legal systems and the criminalization of social groups as lenses on modern states’ techniques for disciplining populations, reproducing structures of privilege, and articulating nationalist ideologies. In addition to looking from the perspective of states, we consider the ways subjects and citizens manipulate, modify and evade legal regimes. Moving from the [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]