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 Women Gender & Sexuality, Nation State & Civil Society, Empire Modernity & Globalization, and Environment Science & Health.
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.
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 [...]
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.
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 [...]
Thursday, August 21st, 2008
Mark your calendars for two major conferences being sponsored by the History Department in 2008-2009.
I. “The Eighteenth Century Cosmopolis: Global Cities and Citizens in the Age of Sail.”
October 23-24, 2008 at Stony Brook Manhattan
Co-sponsored with the Stony Brook Humanities Institute.
Click on this web link for more information. Conference poster (links to PDF).
II. “The Worlds of Lion [...]
Friday, January 18th, 2008
Within the thematic and cross-national emphasis of the history doctorate at Stony Brook, Latin American history remains a thriving area concentration. Indeed, Stony Brook is recognized as one of the country’s top Ph.D. training centers in Latin American history. Since 1990, Stony Brook has awarded more than two dozen doctorates in [...]
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 [...]
Nation State & Civil Society
Empire Modernity & Globalization
Health Science & Environment
Women Gender & Sexuality