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 is one of the theme seminars in the Doctoral program of the Department of History.  It is open to all doctoral students and MA students in the History program.  All others, including MAT students, must have the instructor’s permission to enroll.
The readings will include a mixture of thematic, theoretical and geographically focused texts.  Most [...]

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 broadly, [...]

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 [...]

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 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.

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, [...]

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 [...]