Graduate Program
The History Department offers a masters program that qualifies students for employment in a number of fields, including teaching and government research, though in past years a substantial number of people admitted to this program have ultimately gone on to pursue the Ph.D. As with the Doctoral Program, the Master’s Program accepts a limited number of students in the fall semester. Prospective students should be aware that funding opportunities for masters students are limited, as Graduate School regulations stipulate that students pursuing only a master’s degree in a department that offers a doctoral degree cannot be awarded a teaching assistantship or similar forms of funding. For additional information on financial aid for Master’s students, go to:
http://www.stonybrook.edu/finaid/applying/federal.shtml
Program Requirements:
Students in the masters program follow the same course of study as entering doctoral students. They are expected to develop a concentration in a region or period, or in an interdisciplinary field, and to conduct research in this area of concentration in the core seminar.
A. Coursework:
The required coursework for the Master’s degree consists of 30 credit hours distributed in the following manner. Descriptions of these courses may be found above, under the Doctoral Program Coursework.
- Core Seminar (HIS 525/526, 524/527, 3 credits each semester): This course provides an intensive, year-long introduction to historical theory and research and familiarizes students with the thematic organization of the Stony Brook graduate program. All full-time students in the master’s program are required to take this course, which is offered only as a fall/spring sequence, during their first year.
- Two Field Seminars (3 credits each): The department offers a number of field seminars designed to familiarize students with the history and historiography of specific regions: Europe, the United States, Latin America, Asia, and Africa. . These courses are offered—at a minimum—on a two-year cycle, though many of them are offered each year. Students choosing to concentrate in the history of a specific region are encouraged, but not required, to complete both parts of the field seminar sequence where available.
- Two Theme Seminars (3 credits each): The theme seminars are the heart of the department’s commitment to the theoretically informed, interdisciplinary study of history. Theme seminars generally fall under the department’s major themes: Gender, Race, and Sexuality; Nation-State, Civil Society, and Popular Politics; Empire, Colonialism, and Globalization; and Environment, Health, Science and Technology. A minimum of two theme seminars is offered each semester. Topics change regularly, and students are free to choose among the theme seminars being offered.
- Four Electives (3 credits each): The remaining 12 credits can be selected from Field Seminars, Theme Seminars, the graduate courses offered in conjunction with other departments (e.g. Sociology, Africana Studies, and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies).
Below is one sample course of study for students in the masters program:
Fall: for 12 credits. HIS 524: Core Seminar
HIS 521: Field Seminar — United States History to the Civil War HIS 541: Field Seminar — Colonial Latin America
HIS 5XX: Theme seminar
Spring: for 12 credits. HIS 526: Core Seminar
HIS 522: Field Seminar — United States History since the Civil War
HIS 5xx: Outside course (elective) HIS 5XX: Theme seminar (elective)
B. Language Requirement:
Master’s students with a concentration in European history must pass a written exam in an appropriate foreign language, and students in Latin American history must pass a written exam in Spanish or Portuguese. The other areas of concentration currently do not require a foreign language for the master’s degree.
C. Oral Examination:
By the Fall semester of their second year, the MA student should identify his/her two-person Orals Committee. The student’s Advisor will examine the MA student in readings in his/her major geo-political field (Modern Europe, Colonial North America, etc.); a second faculty member will examine the student in a complementary field (usually based on a Theme seminar). The MA Oral Exam is taken at the end of the student’s course of study. By the end of the Fall semester or the beginning of the Spring semester of Year 2, the MA student shall present to his Orals Committee a list of books and topics to be examined. Preparation for the Oral Exam may be completed through the Orals Workshop during the semester of the examination. The student should arrange the exam’s time and date with the two faculty members on the Committee, as well as through the Graduate Coordinator’s office. The MA exam will be approximately one hour, and graded as a “pass with distinction,” “pass,” or “fail.” In the rare event of failure, the MA student may petition to take the Oral Exam a second time, at a future date.
Advising:
Upon acceptance of the student into the graduate program, the graduate director will assign the student an advisor based on the interests identified by the student in her/his application to the program. If the student decides to make a significant change in field of interest, her/his advisor should be changed accordingly, in consultation with the graduate director.
The advisor will meet with each advisee during the registration period of the first semester to discuss the structure and requirements of the program and the student’s individual course of study. The advisor will meet with the student for the same purpose each semester. Course and requirement check-off sheets will be given to the student each semester, which will be filled out for the Department’s Graduate Office in consultation with the advisor.
The advisor will be present and participate in the annual Faculty Meeting and Student Conference at the end of the academic year. MA students will be evaluated according to their academic performance and progress (see “Advising and Evaluation” under the Doctoral program). If there are concerns or problems, the student’s advisor will meet with the student to discuss them. However, it is hoped that all MA students will keep in close touch with their advisors about their progress over the course of the academic year.
Master’s Students Seeking to Enter the Ph.D. Program:
Master’s students seeking to continue in Stony Brook’s Ph.D. program must submit a formal application to the Graduate School. Admission into the Ph.D. program is not guaranteed. Meanwhile, MA students are welcome to participate in all departmental activities, described above.
Graduate Blog
Friday, February 3rd, 2012
Suzanne Swartz, PhD student in Department of History chosen for Lipper Internship Program at the Museum of Jewish Heritage
Swartz, a PhD student in the Department of History, has studied the Museum’s exhibitions, heard testimony from Holocaust survivors and attended seminars led by Museum scholars. “Lippers” then begin sharing the knowledge they have obtained with their communities’ schools by giving presentations on Jewish heritage and the Holocaust. “Training was informative and supportive, but on another level personal and moving,” said Swartz. “It fully prepared me to begin working with students, and I am also taking new perspectives and insights with me about the importance of education and remembrance.”
Posted in Department News, Graduate, Home Page by Domenica Tafuro on February 3, 2012 at 10:34 am |
Monday, January 23rd, 2012
The Departments of History and Geosciences and the Humanities Center
Stony Brook University
Present
Conevery Bolton-Valencius
Department of History, University of Massachusetts Boston
Vernacular Science of the New Madrid Earthquakes:
Creating Knowledge in the Early United States
In the winter of 1811-12, a series of sizable tremors rippled out from the middle Mississippi Valley. What we now term the New Madrid earthquakes were of immediate and pressing concern to the North Americans displaced, shaken, or frightened by them. This presentation, from a forthcoming book on changing historical understandings of the New Madrid Seismic Zone, argues that the intense public interest and discussion surrounding the New Madrid earthquakes reveals a multi-faceted world of vernacular science in the early United States.
During the long sequence of earthquakes and in the months, years, and decades after, observers took weather measurements; recorded the effects of the shocks on their homes, livestock, and their own bodies; created devices for revealing the intensity and direction of the shocks; and investigated a multitude of effects from fouled wells to strange mineral deposits. They reported Native American accounts from near the epicenters and from further west. In ways both idiosyncratic and creative, early Americans attempted to convey and come to terms with these sudden and disruptive temblors. Accounts of the quakes demonstrate the blurred nature of expert and nonexpert discussions in the early nineteenth century. Because of the lack of clear consensus about the mechanisms or causes of earthquakes, people in borderland regions along the Ohio and Mississippi Valley became not simply witnesses but theorists of the dramatic seismicity they had experienced. Their attempts to record and explain events that overwhelmed them reveal a broadly-shared and vigorous culture of science in the early United States.
This earlier history also highlights the surprising forgetting of the quakes in the late nineteenth century, a forgetting that took place for social and environmental as well as scientific reasons. The New Madrid quakes represent an event once taken for granted that receded almost into tall tale for the better part of a century.
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
1 p.m. Humanities 1008
Posted in Department News, Environment Health Science & Technology, Graduate, Home Page, Research by Chris Sellers on January 23, 2012 at 1:40 pm |
Monday, November 28th, 2011
Environment, Medicine, Techno-Science
Crosby, Alfred. Ecological imperialism : the biological expansion of Europe, 900-1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Drayton, Richard. Nature’s government : science, imperial Britain, and the “Improvement” of the World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.
Foucault, Michel. The order of things : an archaeology of the human sciences. New York: Vintage Books, 1994.
Haraway, Donna. Primate visions : gender, race, and nature in the world of modern science. New York: Routledge, 1989.
Harding, Sandra. The science question in feminism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986.
Kuhn, Thomas. The structure of scientific revolutions. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.
Latour, Bruno. Laboratory life : the construction of scientific facts. 2nd ed. Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986.
McNeill, J. R. Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World. New York: Norton, 2000.
Mitman, Greg. Ecology, community, and American social thought, 1900-1950. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Reverby, Susan. Examining Tuskegee : the infamous syphilis study and its legacy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
Richards, John F. The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
Shapin, Steven, and Simon Schaffer. Leviathan and the air-pump : Hobbes, Boyle, and the experimental life. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985.
White, Richard. The Organic Machine. New York: Hill and Wang, 1996.
Worster, Donald. Dust Bowl : the southern plains in the 1930s. 25th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Posted in Environment Health Science & Technology, Graduate by Eric Lewis Beverley on November 28, 2011 at 4:25 pm |
Tuesday, November 8th, 2011
Gender, Race, Sexuality
Brown, Wendy. States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1995.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1999.
Bynum, Caroline Walker. Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion. New York: Zone Books, 1992.
Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. New York: Basic Books, 1994.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Vintage Books ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Goldberg, David. The racial state. Malden Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2002.
Hunt, Lynn Avery. The Family Romance of the French Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
Nirenberg, David. Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1996.
Sinha, Mrinalini. Specters of Mother India : the global restructuring of an Empire. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.
Stoler, Ann Laura. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995.
Posted in Gender Race & Sexuality, Graduate by Eric Lewis Beverley on November 8, 2011 at 10:33 pm |
Tuesday, November 8th, 2011
Posted in Graduate by Domenica Tafuro on November 8, 2011 at 4:18 pm |
Sunday, October 16th, 2011
Colonialism, Capitalism, Modernity
Early Modern Colonialism/Latin America:
Clendinnen, Inga. Ambivalent conquests : Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517-1570. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Mignolo, Walter. The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization. 2nd ed. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003.
Capitalism/World Systems:
Abu-Lughod, Janet L. Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Braudel, Fernand. Capitalism and material life, 1400-1800. New York: Harper and Row, 1973.
Frank, Andre Gunder. ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
Pomeranz, Kenneth. The great divergence : China, Europe, and the making of the modern world economy. Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Wallerstein, Immanuel Maurice. The Modern World-System. New York: Academic Press, 1974.
Modern Colonialism:
Cooper, Frederick, and Ann Laura Stoler, eds. Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
Cooper, Frederick. Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.
Wolf, Eric R. Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
Modernity:
Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford [England]: Blackwell, 1989.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.
Posted in Empire Colonialism & Globalisation, Graduate by Eric Lewis Beverley on October 16, 2011 at 6:06 pm |
Tuesday, October 11th, 2011
A Continuing Series on Environmental Studies and History Presents:
A talk by Professor Andrew Hurley
University of Missouri, St. Louis
Interpreting History in 3D:Applications of the Virtual City
in Communities, Classrooms, and Scholarship
Professor Hurley, a leading environmental and cultural historian, will speak about his and colleagues’ creation of the Virtual City, a “simulated world of downtown St. Louis from 1850 to 1950,” with many uses. Hurley is the author of Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945-1980 (1995); Chasing the American Dream: A History of Diners, Bowling Alleys and Trailer Parks (2001); and Beyond Preservation: Using Public History to Revitalize Inner-Cities (2010).
Monday, October 31, 2011
11:45 a.m.-1:00 p.m.
1008 Humanities Building (in the Humanities Institute)
Posted in Department News, Environment Health Science & Technology, Faculty, Graduate, Home Page by Chris Sellers on October 11, 2011 at 3:32 pm |
Monday, September 12th, 2011
Nation, Popular Politics, Culture
Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009.
Guha, Ranajit. Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999.
Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1991.
Hobsbawm, E. J, and T. O Ranger, eds. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge [UK]: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Scott, James. Weapons of the weak : everyday forms of peasant resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.
Stedman Jones, Gareth. Languages of class : studies in English working class history, 1832-1982. Cambridge [UK]: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the past : power and the production of history. Boston Mass.: Beacon Press, 1995.
Williams, Raymond. Culture and materialism : selected essays. London : Verso, 2005.
[Most of these books are on library reserve. Search under HIS524. - elb & pg]
Posted in Graduate, Nation-State Civil Society & Popular Politics by Eric Lewis Beverley on September 12, 2011 at 10:21 am |
Monday, September 12th, 2011
Historiographies & Theory
Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
Chartier, Roger. The Order of Books: Readers, Authors and Libraries in Europe Between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Cambridge [UK]: Polity Press, 1994.
Eley, Geoff. A crooked line : from cultural history to the history of society. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005.
Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures; Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1973.
Goody, Jack. The theft of history. Cambridge [UK]: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Hobsbawm, E. On history. New York: New Press, 1997.
White, Hayden V. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973.
———. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.
[Most of these books are on library reserve. Search under HIS524. - elb & pg]
Posted in Graduate by Eric Lewis Beverley on September 12, 2011 at 10:12 am |
Thursday, August 18th, 2011
Colloquium Series held during Campus Lifetime (12:50-2:10 pm) in Room N318
Wednesday, September 21, 2011:
Marisa Balsamo, Rational Recreation in the Spectacle of Victorian London.
Wednesday, October 12, 2011:
Ying-Ying Chu, Measuring Cultural Change: A History of the Cornell-Peru Project, 1952-1964.
Wednesday, October 26, 2011:
Adam Charboneau, John Lindsay’s Fun City and New York’s Open Spaces, 1966-1973
Tuesday, November 1, 2011:
Andrew Ehrinpreis, Culture and Equality: the Emergence of a Creole Discourse of Legal-Political Equality in Peru, 1781-1828.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011:
Gregory Rosenthal, “Aloha with Tears:” Letters Home from Hawaiian Migrant Laborers.
Posted in Department News, Graduate, Home Page, Research by Domenica Tafuro on August 18, 2011 at 11:16 am |
Department of History