TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 14th
1:00-2:15 PM
Social & Behavioral Sciences Bldg., Room N320

“A World of Many Flags: Privateering and the Strange Sovereignty of the Provincia Oriental”
Lauren Benton, New York University

Papers will be posted on the IHSS website:  http://www.stonybrook.edu/sociology/ihss/events.shtml

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

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 the past century and longer. Environmental hazards from industry remain one of the world’s foremost killers. Dangerous Trade establishes historical groundwork for a better understanding of how and why these hazards continue to threaten our shrinking world.

In this timely collection, an international group of scholars casts a rigorous eye towards efforts to combat these ailments. Dangerous Trade contains a wide range of case studies that illuminate transnational movements of risk—from the colonial plantations of Indonesia to compensation laws in late 19th century Britain, and from the occupational medicine clinics of 1960s New York City to the burning of electronic waste in early twenty-first century Uruguay.

The essays in Dangerous Trade provide an unprecedented broad perspective of the dangers stirred up by industrial activity across the globe, as well as the voices rasied to remedy them.

Introduction

How to Order

His 326, Course Description

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.

Spring 2012 Course Descriptions

Click on link for Spring 2012 Courses: Spring 2o12

Vito Cannavo graduated from Stony Brook in 1975. He received his law degree from Cornell three years later and subsequently served as law clerk to U.S. District Court Judge Mark Constantino. He worked at the New York City Law Department Office of the Corporation Council, before joining and becoming a partner of Sullivan Papain Block McGrath & Cannavo P.C. He has been recognized as one of the best litigation lawyers in the country.