Check out the link to this video, prepared by the American Historical Association’s film-making team, on our graduate program here in the history department:

Preparing Historians for the Challenge of 21st Century Academia

Here are some pictures from the premiere showing of a video featuring our department’s graduate program, at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association in San Diego, CA.   For those of you who couldn’t make it…

Spring 2010 Calendar

Stony Brook Faculty Workshop

Benedict Robinson (Thursday February 11, 12:50-2:10)

(Stony Brook University Department of English)

“DISGUST, C. 1610, FARINGDON WARD WITHOUT.”

New Research in Historical Social Sciences

Pablo Piccato (Tuesday March 9, 12:50-2:10)

(Columbia University, History Department. Director of ILAS – Institute of Latin American Studies)

“MURDER AND POLITICS IN TWENTIETH CENTURY MEXICO”

New Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives

Paul M. Bingham and Joanne Souza (Wednesday April 14, 12:50-2:10)

(Stony Brook University Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology)

“HUMAN HISTORY AND POLITICAL BEHAVIOR – RICH NEW LESSONS FROM EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY”

As a research project for my history of industrial hazards class (History 414), students created wikis on the history of some of Long Island’s hazardous waste sites, regulated under the EPA’s Superfund site.  We’ve now converted the results into publicly available websites.  Check it out if you are interested….

Overview

Suffolk County: Farmingdale area, Holbrook area,  Port Jefferson/Upton area

Nassau County: Farmingdale area, Hicksville area

Tuesday, December 15, 2009, the Science Times section of the New York Times has published my first Letter to the Editor ever. Some decline.

Monday, 14 December 2009, volume 21, issue 1, of the LIHJ went online with six articles, eight reviews, a video interview, the first images of its eMuseum and the “enhanced mission” of writing Long Island history into the larger framework of local, national, and global history.

The Editor in Chief, Charles Backfish, summarized the main content of volume 21, issue 1:

The articles in this first online issue of the Long Island History Journal underscore this enhanced mission. Our publisher and Editor at Large, Wolf Schäfer, sets the conceptual stage using a letter written by Albert Einstein (summering in what is now Cutchogue) to illustrate the intersection of global, national and local history. Joshua Ruff, Associate Editor, offers historical perspective on recent tensions on Long Island involving undocumented day laborers. Joseph Tiedemann’s article on Thomas Jones, a loyalist in the era of the American Revolution, examines the plight of a Long Island man of privilege confronted with the realities of a more democratic society. Frank Cavaioli traces the chartering of a prominent area educational institution in response to the area’s changing economic needs. Neil Buffett studies high school students organizing to call attention to environmental conservation, while Associate Editor Noel Gish profiles Lee Koppelman, whose important work as a planner in Nassau and Suffolk Counties spanned several decades and whose Center for Regional Policy Studies was the previous publisher of the LIHJ. This article serves as a companion piece to video excerpts from an interview with Koppelman, which inaugurates what will be an on-going feature of the LIHJ.

Margaret, Sharon, Gregory, Tao, Nicholas, Erin, Michelle, and William

1st year graduate students at holiday party 2009

This course will look at the history of “modern” consumption patterns with particular emphasis on gender identities.  We will look at changing conceptions of “producers” (traditionally represented as  male) and “consumers”(traditionally gendered as female) and explore the ideas (“rational consumption”), practices (shopping), and  institutions (department stores, advertising agencies) that intertwine to create local and national cultures of consumption.    We will also look at forms of resistance and critique, particularly those from feminist and environmental perspectives.   Readings will introduce students to the theoretical and interdisciplinary diversity of this field, along with interesting new examples of historical work on the topic.  Although readings will focus on the period 1880-1960, students interested in other time periods are very welcome.   In addition to a set of common readings, participants will have the chance to do in depth work on their own specific interests.  Course requirements are regular attendance, participation in class discussion, and a review essay and annotated bibliography on a topic of the student’s choosing.    Readings will include Kristin Hoganson, Consumers’ Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865-1920; Susan Strasser, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash; Lisabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic;  Brent Shannon, The Cut of His Coat: Men, Dress, and Consumer Culture in Britain, 1860 –1914, and Sherman Cochran, Chinese Medicine Men: Consumer Culture in China and Southeast Asia.

This course will explore the history of work and environment during the modern era (nineteenth and twentieth centuries).  We will start with readings from “classic” texts and authors that have  set older and newer agendas for the fields of labor history (Marx, Fink, D. Montgomery) and environmental history (Marx, Worster, Cronon), centered, in contrasting ways, around the notion of “capitalist production.” For these as well as the newer works in both fields that comprise the bulk of our reading list, we will consider what authors may (or may not) have to say to one another about the sphere of production and its history.    Key areas of discussion will also include: the historical implications of recent debates over nature of “modern” and “postmodern” capitalism; comparison of the work and environmental history of “developed” versus “developing” worlds; and the transnational and/or global dimensions of workplace and environmental change. Focus will fall in particular on the new ways that historians are figuring space and geography into labor and business history, and work into environmental history.  While the reading list for much of the semester will be set in advance, readings and geographic coverage in many of the later sessions will hinge upon student preferences and needs.

Readings:

There are four books that everyone in the course will be required to read:

David Montgomery, Workers Control in America

William Cronon, Changes in the Land

Linda Nash, Inescapable Inequalities; A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge

Laura Raynolds, et al., Banana Wars: Power, Production and History in the Americas

In addition, everyone will be required to read one out of each of these two pairs of books:

(1) John McNeill, Something New Under the Sun or

Beverley Silver, Forces of Labor: Workers’ Movements and Globalization since 1870

(2) Nancy Jacobs, Environment, Power and Injustice or

Andrew Hurley, Environmental Inequalities

While we will bring many other readings to the table, most will be selected and presented by individuals within the class.

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 of our readings will derive from European history and from the Christian experience, modern and early modern, but there will be several readings that focus on East Asia, North America, Latin America, Russia (my area of specialization), Islam and Judaism.  Students from all of the department’s fields of concentration are welcome to enroll.

Each week will have a body of common readings that will form the basis of our discussion.  In addition, each student will select one week’s theme and develop a bibliography of supplementary readings that connect that theme to the student’s area(s) of interest.  That bibliography will form the basis of a historiographic or bibliographic essay (approximately 15-20 pp.) that each of you will write, due on the final class meeting.  You are encouraged to work with your advisor in developing the bibliography.

There will be at least two other-and much shorter-writing assignments, in which you will be asked to apply some of the ideas raised in the readings to brief documents that I will distribute in class.

BOOKS:

Natalie Davis, WOMEN ON THE MARGINS

Marilyn Westerkamp, WOMEN AND RELIGION IN EARLY AMERICA

Miriam Peskowitz, SPINNING FANTASIES: RABBIS, GENDER, AND HISTORY

Calum G. Brown, THE DEATH OF CHRISTIAN ENGLAND

Irene Silverblatt, MOON, SUN, AND WITCHES: GENDER IDEOLOGIES AND CLASS IN INCA AND COLONIAL PERU

Carolyn Bynum, FRAGMENTATION AND REDEMPTION; ESSAYS ON GENDER AND THE HUMAN BODY IN MEDIEVAL RELIGION

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.