Chris Sellers



Associate Professor (Ph.D., American Studies, Yale University, 1992; M.D., University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, 1992)
E-Mail
christopher.sellers@sunysb.edu
Office
SBS N301A
Phone
631-632-1412
Fax
631-632-7367
Research Interests

U.S. Environmental and Cultural, History of Health and Medicine, Transnational Industrial and Urban History

Publications

BOOKS-IN-PROGRESS:

Unsettling Ground: Suburban Nature and Environmentalism in Twentieth-Century America (offered advanced contract by UNC Press, forthcoming Spring 2010)

Dangerous Trade: Industrial Hazards and Globalization in the Twentieth Century (co-edited with Joseph Melling of University of Exeter, based on December 2007 Stony Brook conference, under consideration by Temple University Press)

The Uneven Development of Industrial Hazards: Lead and Oil in the U.S. versus Mexico (new project)

Wealth and Inequality in the Modern Corporate Age: A Course Reader (new project)

ARTICLES-IN-PROGRESS

"Cities and Suburbs in Environmental History," for Douglas Sackman, editor, Companion to Environmental History (Blackwell, forthcoming)

with Jeffrey Sellers, "Placing Environmental Politics: The U.S. Versus Germany"

"Suburban Nature, Class, and Environmentalism in Levittown," in Diane Harris, Editor, [Levittown in History] (Pennsylvania University Press, forthcoming)

"Cross-Nationalizing the History of Industrial Hazard" (under submission to Medical History

EDITED VOLUMES:

Co-Editor with Christine Rosen, Special Issue of Business History Review on "Business and the Environment," 73 (Winter 1999)

Co-Editor with Gregg Mitman and Michelle Murphy, Forthcoming Special Issue of Osiris on "Landscapes of Exposure: Environment and Health in Historical Perspective," 19( 2005)

BOOK

Christopher C. Sellers, Hazards of the Job: From Industrial Disease to Environmental Health Science (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997)

SELECTED RECENT ARTICLES:

“Cities and Suburbs in Environmental History,” essay for TeacherServe Website entitled Nature Transformed, posted by National Humanities Center, 2008

Co-contributor, “What Is African-American Environmental History?,” in Diane Glave, ed., “What’s Next for African American Environmental History?,” ASEH News 17(Spring, 2006), special insert

“Race and Nature in Suburban Passage,” in Diane Glave and Mark Stoll, eds., “To Love the Wind and Rain”: Essays in African American Environmental History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), 93-119

With Gregg Mitman and Michelle Murphy, “A Cloud over History,” Osiris 19(2005):1-1

“The Artificial Nature of Fluoridated Water: Between Nations, Knowledges and Material Flows,” Osiris 19(2005):182-202

“9-11 and the History of Hazard,” Journal of History of Medicine and the Life Sciences 58(2003):255-91

“The Dearth of the Clinic: Lead, Air and Agency in Twentieth-Century America,” Journal of History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 58(2003):255-9

“Thoreau’s Body; Towards an Embodied Environmental History,” Environmental History 4, no. 4 (1999):487-514

With Christine Rosen, “The `Nature’ of the Firm: Towards an Ecocultural History of Business,” Business History Review 73(1999):577-600

“Body, Place and the State: The Makings of an `Environmentalist’ Imaginary in the Post-WWII U.S.,” Radical History Review 74(Winter 1999):31-64

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From TIMES BEACON HERALD, October 9, 2008:

Blog by Chris Sellers

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…

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”

History of Long Island Superfund Sites

Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009

As a research project for my history of industrial hazards class (History 414), students created wikis on the history of some of Long Island’s hazardous waste sites, regulated under the EPA’s Superfund site.  We’ve now converted the results into publicly available websites.  Check it out if you are interested….

Overview

Suffolk County: Farmingdale area, Holbrook area,  Port Jefferson/Upton area

Nassau County: Farmingdale area, Hicksville area

International Perspectives on History of Work and Environment

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

This course will explore the history of work and environment during the modern era (nineteenth and twentieth centuries).  We will start with readings from “classic” texts and authors that have  set older and newer agendas for the fields of labor history (Marx, Fink, D. Montgomery) and environmental history (Marx, Worster, Cronon), centered, in contrasting ways, around the notion of “capitalist production.” For these as well as the newer works in both fields that comprise the bulk of our reading list, we will consider what authors may (or may not) have to say to one another about the sphere of production and its history.    Key areas of discussion will also include: the historical implications of recent debates over nature of “modern” and “postmodern” capitalism; comparison of the work and environmental history of “developed” versus “developing” worlds; and the transnational and/or global dimensions of workplace and environmental change. Focus will fall in particular on the new ways that historians are figuring space and geography into labor and business history, and work into environmental history.  While the reading list for much of the semester will be set in advance, readings and geographic coverage in many of the later sessions will hinge upon student preferences and needs.

Readings:

There are four books that everyone in the course will be required to read:

David Montgomery, Workers Control in America

William Cronon, Changes in the Land

Linda Nash, Inescapable Inequalities; A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge

Laura Raynolds, et al., Banana Wars: Power, Production and History in the Americas

In addition, everyone will be required to read one out of each of these two pairs of books:

(1) John McNeill, Something New Under the Sun or

Beverley Silver, Forces of Labor: Workers’ Movements and Globalization since 1870

(2) Nancy Jacobs, Environment, Power and Injustice or

Andrew Hurley, Environmental Inequalities

While we will bring many other readings to the table, most will be selected and presented by individuals within the class.

For History of American Suburbia Students

Thursday, December 4th, 2008

Click on the title of this entry to find links to those extra documents I promised for your suburban town histories.

Chris

Land Use Map, 1968

Land Use Map Key to Different Uses

Racial Composition and Total Population, 1960 and 1970

“Climates” Intiative–Carbon Footprint of Port Jefferson, NY

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.

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.

Conference: “Dangerous Trade”

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.