Research

The department has strength in a number of traditional areas of historical study including Latin America and the Caribbean, United States (colonial/early Republic, 19th and 20th centuries), Europe and Russia (medieval, early modern, modern), modern East and South Asia and Africa. However, graduates of the best doctoral programs are increasingly expected to be able to transcend specialties defined in such terms, to root their work in transnational and interdisciplinary frameworks, and to apply such concepts as class, gender, race, culture, power, religion and environment in an explicit and sophisticated manner to the study of the past.

Our doctoral program has dramatically altered the nature of graduate training, moving away from an exclusive focus on regional, national and chronological fields towards thematic courses covering broad geographical areas. These include Gender, Race, & Sexuality; Nation-State, Civil Society, & Popular Politics; Empire, Colonialism, & Globalization; and Environment, Health, Science & Technology.

The department has chosen to place these thematic questions at the heart of the graduate program in order to insure that our graduates can compete successfully with graduates of other leading research universities. The department also has a long tradition of comparative, interdisciplinary, and theoretically-informed research. We maintain close connections with the Stony Brook Humanities Institute, the new doctoral program in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, the Women’s Studies Program, Africana Studies, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and the Center for Global History.

Graduate students from other departments seek training in our seminars, and we encourage our graduate students to take at least one seminar in another discipline.

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Research Blog

Spring Schedule, Intiative for Historical Social Sciences

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010

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 [...]

History of Long Island Superfund Sites

Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009

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 [...]

History 532–History/Culture of Consumerism

Monday, November 23rd, 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 [...]

History 532: Theme Seminar on Gender, Religion and Modernity

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

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.  [...]

Fall 2009 Schedule: Initiative for Historical Social Sciences

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

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 [...]

Reviews of Andean Cocaine (2009)

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

Social History (link opens RTF file)
La República (Lima, Peru)

Amazon.com
Alternet

HIS 542–Modern Latin American History (Graduate Field Seminar)

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

This Field Seminar introduces some major debates and literatures about Latin American history since 1820. It is designed for MA-level students who intend to go on to a Ph.D. in Latin American History, though advanced students from other geographic concentrations, disciplines, and area universities are more than welcome.
The focus is mainly historiographical or methodological: [...]

History 534 — Race and Nation-Making in the Americas

Friday, February 6th, 2009

This course will examine the formation of racial, ethnic and national identities in different American contexts in the modern era. We will begin with broad synthetic approaches to the history of racial discourses and their sociopolitical uses in the formation of modern nations, empires, and market economies. In this course, I want to [...]

HIS 653 — Transnationalizing History/Historicizing the Global

Friday, February 6th, 2009

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 [...]

History 532 — Gender, Religion and Modernity

Friday, February 6th, 2009

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.  [...]