Congratulations to Gregory Rosenthal, whose article “Life and Labor in a Seabird Colony: Hawaiian Guano Workers, 1857-1870″ has been accepted for publication in the journal Environmental History. Environmental History is the world’s leading scholarly journal in environmental history and the journal of record in the field. Gregory prepared and wrote the first versions of this paper last year, in the department’s core seminar for entering graduate students.

Mwagi Njagi, Stony Brook History Ph.D., has become Director of American University Programs in Kenya and adjunct professor in its School of International Service. Congratulations!

Congratulations to Froylán Enciso, History Department, Ph.D. candidate, on his recent award from the SSRC in its highly competitive Drugs, Security and Democracy (DSD) Fellowship program. The DSD program supports research on organized crime, drug policy, issues of governance, and associated topics across the social sciences and related disciplines in Latin America and the Caribbean. The fellowship seeks to develop a concentration of researchers who are interested in policy-relevant outcomes and membership in a global interdisciplinary network.

Congratulations to Mark Rice, History Department, Ph.D. candidate, whose article entitled “Transnational Business and U.S. Diplomacy in Late Nineteenth-Century South America: W. R. Grace & Co. and the Chilean Crises of 1891″ was selected for print into the Journal of Latin American Studies, a peer-reviewed academic journal published by Cambridge University Press. The Journal presents recent research in the field of Latin American studies in economics, geography, politics, international relations, sociology, social anthropology, and history.

The Departments of History and Technology and Society and the Humanities Institute

Stony Brook University

Present

Ann Green
Department of History and Sociology of Science

University of Pennsylvania

“Rethinking Energy Histories and Landscapes”

Current concerns over energy consumption and environmental consequence are creating growing scholarly interest in energy history, and especially in understanding the energy transitions of the past.   Changes in the kinds of energy consumed and in levels of energy consumption have long been central to an understanding of industrialization.   Yet the focus has been largely on wood, coal and oil, overlooking other forms of widely consumed energies.  This talk emphasizes the critical role of animal power in American industrialization, and reexamines how the question of transition away from animal power is understood in historical literature.
Monday, April 30, 2012
3:30 p.m. Humanities 1008

Ann Green is the author of, among many publications, “Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America” (Harvard UP, 2008), winner of the 2009 Pioneer America Society Fred B. Kniffen Award for best book.

This course will provide an advanced introduction to South Asian history and historiography from the early modern period to the present. We will cover major works on key themes, including precolonial cultural relations, colonialism and imperialism, the politics of religious identity, anti-colonialism and nationalism, decolonization and partition, and postcolonial developments. Readings of classics of the field – drawn from various schools of historiography – will be supplemented with selections from relevant primary sources. This is not a survey course, and does not attempt to be comprehensive. No prior knowledge of the field is prerequisite, and the course will begin with a rapid thematic survey of South Asian history. This course is jointly designed for History PhD and MA students for whose research and teaching a knowledge of South Asian history will be useful, and for MAT students who intend to teach South Asian and global history at the advanced secondary level. Requirements include preparation and participation, a series of short response or feedback papers, project presentation, and either a topical historiographical essay (for HIS 536 students), or a lesson plan (for CEG 536 students).

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.”

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

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.

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.