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 Women Gender & Sexuality, Nation State & Civil Society, Empire Modernity & Globalization, and Environment Science & Health.
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.
Research Blog
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 [...]
Posted in Department News, Faculty, Home Page, Research by Eric Lewis Beverley on August 19, 2009 at 11:01 am |
Tuesday, June 16th, 2009
Social History (link opens RTF file)
La República (Lima, Peru)
Amazon.com
Alternet
Posted in Home Page, Research by Paul Gootenberg on June 16, 2009 at 2:45 pm |
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: [...]
Posted in Home Page, Nation State & Civil Society by Paul Gootenberg on June 16, 2009 at 2:24 pm |
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 [...]
Posted in Nation State & Civil Society by Brooke Larson on February 6, 2009 at 3:37 pm |
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 [...]
Posted in Empire Modernity & Globalisation, Home Page by Young-Sun Hong on February 6, 2009 at 3:34 pm |
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. [...]
Posted in Women Gender & Sexuality by Gary Marker on February 6, 2009 at 3:32 pm |
Friday, February 6th, 2009
This Theme Seminar, intended primarily for aspiring Ph.D. students from any regional concentration or discipline, explores the history of what anthropologist Sidney Mintz calls the “food-drugs”–sugar, tobacco, coffee, alcohol, betel, chocolate, yerba mate, coca and the like. It examines their creation as commodities and their powerful historical contributions to colonialism, capitalism and modernity. More [...]
Posted in Empire Modernity & Globalisation by Paul Gootenberg on February 6, 2009 at 3:23 pm |
Sunday, February 1st, 2009
The State University of New York at Stony Brook, in cooperation with the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, will hold a conference in Stony Brook on March 20-21, 2009, on “The Worlds of Lion Gardiner, c. 1599-1663: Crossings and Boundaries.” Military man and engineer, chronicler and diplomat, lord of a New English manor [...]
Posted in Department News, Empire Modernity & Globalisation, Graduate, Home Page, Research by Ned Landsman on February 1, 2009 at 3:12 pm |
Sunday, October 19th, 2008
This seminar takes legal systems and the criminalization of social groups as lenses on modern states’ techniques for disciplining populations, reproducing structures of privilege, and articulating nationalist ideologies. In addition to looking from the perspective of states, we consider the ways subjects and citizens manipulate, modify and evade legal regimes. Moving from the [...]
Posted in Empire Modernity & Globalisation, Home Page, Nation State & Civil Society by Eric Lewis Beverley on October 19, 2008 at 12:25 pm |
Saturday, October 11th, 2008
Check out the following coverage of a joint effort by Stony Brook faculty and leaders and residents of the small suburban town of Port Jefferson, NY, to “Green Port Jefferson.” Page 12 details an effort to study Port Jefferson’s carbon footprint, led by Chris Sellers of the History Department, and Jessica Gurevitch, of the Department [...]
Posted in Environment Science & Health, Home Page by Chris Sellers on October 11, 2008 at 9:12 am |
Nation State & Civil Society
Empire Modernity & Globalization
Health Science & Environment
Women Gender & Sexuality