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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Monday, April 23rd, 2012
The Departments of History and Technology and Society and the Humanities Institute
Stony Brook University
Present
Ann Green
Department of History and Sociology of Science
University of Pennsylvania
“Rethinking Energy Histories and Landscapes”
Current concerns over energy consumption and environmental consequence are creating growing scholarly interest in energy history, and especially in understanding the energy transitions of the past. Changes in the [...]
Tuesday, March 20th, 2012
This course will provide an advanced introduction to South Asian history and historiography from the early modern period to the present. We will cover major works on key themes, including precolonial cultural relations, colonialism and imperialism, the politics of religious identity, anti-colonialism and nationalism, decolonization and partition, and postcolonial [...]
Tuesday, March 6th, 2012
Annette Ricciardi’s colloquium presentation, “Concubinage and Miscegenation in the Early Modern Dutch Atlantic World,” originally scheduled for Wednesday, March 28, is postponed until further notice.
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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
Department of History
