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
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 [...]
Posted in Department News, Environment Health Science & Technology, Graduate, Home Page, Research by Chris Sellers on January 23, 2012 at 1:40 pm |
Tuesday, January 17th, 2012
Dangerous Trade
Histories of Industrial Hazard across a Globalizing World
edited by Christopher Sellers and Joseph Melling
Is now out from Temple University Press, December 2011.
Based on a December 2007 conference at Stony Brook University. Follow the further discussion on our Facebook page:
From anthrax to asbestos to pesticides, industrial toxins and pollutants have troubled the world for [...]
Posted in Environment Health Science & Technology by Chris Sellers on January 17, 2012 at 11:14 am |
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, [...]
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 [...]
Posted in Gender Race & Sexuality, Graduate by Eric Lewis Beverley on November 8, 2011 at 10:33 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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
Posted in Graduate, Nation-State Civil Society & Popular Politics by Eric Lewis Beverley on September 12, 2011 at 10:21 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, [...]
Posted in Department News, Graduate, Home Page, Research by Domenica Tafuro on August 18, 2011 at 11:16 am |
Thursday, June 16th, 2011
We are very proud to announce that Nancy Tomes, history of medicine, women and gender studies and US cultural history, is the winner of the 2011 Arthur J. Viseltear Award, presented by the American Public Health Association’s (APHA) Medical Care section. The honor is given annually to a historian who has made outstanding contributions to [...]
Posted in Department News, Environment Health Science & Technology, Faculty by Domenica Tafuro on June 16, 2011 at 11:24 am |
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 [...]
Posted in Department News, Faculty, Graduate, Research by Chris Sellers on January 13, 2010 at 9:11 am |
Department of History