Department of History

Graduate Program

Teaching Assistantships, Fellowships, and Other Support

Many graduate students are funded through teaching asssistantships. The History Department receives approximately twenty-five teaching assistantships per year from various sources; it also has a small number of graduate assistantships. Many full-time graduate students receive full tuition waivers. In addition, the Department has available to it a series of Presidential Fellowships, created by the president of the university, to be used to recruit promising new doctoral students. The Department also has an endowed fellowship, known as the Evan Frankel Foundation Fellowship, that is given each year to an outstanding first year student in the doctoral program and continues for four years. The Gardiner Graduate Fellowship awards funding to a graduate student researching early American history or subjects related to aspects of American history in which the Gardiner family played an important role – principally colonial American history and the history of the greater New York region.

Everyone who applies is automatically considered for financial assistance from the History Department, usually in the form of a Teaching Assistantship/Tuition Scholarship. There are no special forms to fill out for Departmental support.

Graduate Council Fellowships and Turner Fellowships – Entering graduate students in history may also be nominated by the admissions committee to compete for these university-sponsored awards. If you wish to be considered for either of these financial opportunities, you will need to have your application completed before January 1^st. Students wishing to be considered for these awards must be U.S. Citizens or Permanent Residents. Turner Fellows must self-identify as either African-American, Native American, or Hispanic on their application

US Citizens and Permanent Residents are also eligible for other forms of financial aid, which are applied for via the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) form. Click here for more information, also to apply.

Most NY residents are also eligible for the NYS Tuition Assistance Program (TAP). Click here for more information, also to apply.

Various Awards and Other Funding for Existing Students

The History Department has limited funds to subsidize graduate student travel to conferences and research depositories through the Werner T. Angress Graduate Student Fund. The Fred Weinstein Award is presented annually to the student judged to have written the best dissertation chapter. The Ernesto Chinchilla/Aguilar Award is presented annually to a distinguished graduate student in Latin American History. In addition, a small number of graduate student summer travel grants are available through a grant form the Mellon Foundation.

Stony Brook’s Graduate Student Organization provides a yearly award for professional development known as the Resource Access Project (RAP). RAP forms can be found here.

Students already in the history doctoral program, especially once they get to the dissertation-writing phase, have a strong track record of earning additional university-wide as well as outside grants and fellowships. See Awards & Achievements for a list of those recently earned by our doctoral students.

Graduate Blog

Studying History at Stony Brook: A Video; Pictures from the AHA Premiere

Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

Check out the link to this video, prepared by the American Historical Association’s film-making team, on our graduate program here in the history department:

Preparing Historians for the Challenge of 21st Century Academia

Here are some pictures from the premiere showing of a video featuring our department’s graduate program, at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association in San Diego, CA. For those of you who couldn’t make it…

Posted in Department News, Graduate, Home Page by Chris Sellers on January 26, 2010 at 6:33 pm |

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 and Joanne Souza (Wednesday April 14, 12:50-2:10)

(Stony Brook University Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology)

“HUMAN HISTORY AND POLITICAL BEHAVIOR – RICH NEW LESSONS FROM EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY”

Posted in Department News, Faculty, Graduate, Research by Chris Sellers on January 13, 2010 at 9:11 am |

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. Most of our readings will derive from European history and from the Christian experience, modern and early modern, but there will be several readings that focus on East Asia, North America, Latin America, Russia (my area of specialization), Islam and Judaism. Students from all of the department’s fields of concentration are welcome to enroll.

Each week will have a body of common readings that will form the basis of our discussion. In addition, each student will select one week’s theme and develop a bibliography of supplementary readings that connect that theme to the student’s area(s) of interest. That bibliography will form the basis of a historiographic or bibliographic essay (approximately 15-20 pp.) that each of you will write, due on the final class meeting. You are encouraged to work with your advisor in developing the bibliography.

There will be at least two other-and much shorter-writing assignments, in which you will be asked to apply some of the ideas raised in the readings to brief documents that I will distribute in class.

BOOKS:

Natalie Davis, WOMEN ON THE MARGINS

Marilyn Westerkamp, WOMEN AND RELIGION IN EARLY AMERICA

Miriam Peskowitz, SPINNING FANTASIES: RABBIS, GENDER, AND HISTORY

Calum G. Brown, THE DEATH OF CHRISTIAN ENGLAND

Irene Silverblatt, MOON, SUN, AND WITCHES: GENDER IDEOLOGIES AND CLASS IN INCA AND COLONIAL PERU

Carolyn Bynum, FRAGMENTATION AND REDEMPTION; ESSAYS ON GENDER AND THE HUMAN BODY IN MEDIEVAL RELIGION

Posted in Gender Race & Sexuality, Graduate, Home Page, Research by Gary Marker on November 23, 2009 at 6:05 pm |

Conference: “The Worlds of Lion Gardiner”

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 married to a Dutch woman, Gardiner led a life replete with crossings: of the English Channel to engage in Continental wars, of the Atlantic, of the lesser waters of Long Island Sound, of national, imperial, and colonial borders, of racial divides, and of the very bounds of colonial law. The many crossings in which he and his contemporaries were involved did much to create boundaries between things previously less clearly separated.

Conference website, schedule, and other info

On-line Registration

Posted in Department News, Empire Colonialism & Globalisation, Graduate, Home Page, Research by Ned Landsman on February 1, 2009 at 3:12 pm |

Stony Brook Initiative in the Historical Social Sciences

Friday, September 26th, 2008

Please click here for this fall’s schedule of papers and speakers in this initiative. The series is a collaborative effort of the History and Sociology Departments at Stony Brook.

Posted in Department News, Graduate, Research by Chris Sellers on September 26, 2008 at 9:02 am |