Courses in this thematic area seek to apply the methodologies developed in a variety of fields to the question of the impact of nature on human history. Environmental historians have joined other historians of a more materialist or geographic bent in exploring the ways in which cultural values, technologies, and systems of labor and production have shaped–and been reshaped by–both urban and rural environments. Meanwhile, historians of health and medicine have begun to study the body in terms of its historical interactions with nature at the most intimate level, while those interested in the powerful role science has come to hold in the modern world have taken their studies far beyond the laboratory to examine the ways in which our knowledge of nature has helped reconfigure modern politics, society, and culture. Topics might include history of the contrasts and inter-relations between city and country, technoscience in history, environment and health in global perspective, industry, place and politics, history of the body, and the political and cultural history of natural history.
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 of Ecology and Evolution.
Wednesday, September 24th, 2008
Please feel free to visit the website for the conference I recently convened at Stony Brook, along with University of Exeter’s Joseph Melling, December 13-15, 2008, on “Dangerous Trade: Histories of Industrial Hazard Across a Globalizing World.”
Among the results of the conference are a planned edited volume, as well as a proposal for a Code of Sustainable Practice for Multinational Corporations, which appeared in the July 2008 International Journal for Occupational and Environmental Health.
Friday, January 11th, 2008
WOMEN, MINORITIES, and SUB-GROUPS IN PRE-MODERN AND MODERN URBAN COMMUNITIES
In the modern west, the nation state was long considered the paradigmatic political entity. But in the post-modern world, the importance of the nation state has declined, and we must get used to thinking about other forms of political and communal organization. This course focuses on the society and culture of one such non-state entity: the city. We shall explore a range of tools, concepts, and methodologies used by historians of cities from early medieval Islam through high medieval Marseilles, early modern Venice, modern Europe, and the contemporary U.S. and Latin America. Topics will include the spaces and roles occupied by women, the “theology” and “ideology” of neighborhood, the role of civic ritual, the politics of streets, collectivity versus individuality, the construction of ethnic and racial identity, the origins of the ghetto, and more. Requirements include one oral presentation, one 5-6 page review essay, and one 4-5 page response paper. For MA and PhD students only.