THEMES
The History Department at Stony Brook, particularly its doctoral program, organizes itself in two intersecting ways: themes (described below) and fields. We invite applications from prospective M.A. and Ph.D. students who want to work
across intellectual, disciplinary, and geographic boundaries.
1) Global connections, empire, capitalism
The modern world-system and previous varieties of global connections comprise an increasingly
integrated area of historical analysis that can be studied from different vantage
points. The related study of modern capitalism has recently been revived as a way
to analyze historical inequalities and class cultures. By following transnational
processes, social histories, and historical power formations, this thematic triad
helps to frame and also connect various big historical processes: western imperial
expansion; pre-existing Asian, American, and African trade and state systems; colonial
encounters and cultural representations; the global flow of goods, peoples, and ideas;
and the articulation of metropolitan and colonial social formations. Specific research
topics may include: Comparative empires; commodity histories; material and capitalist
cultures; slavery and labor; hybrid and diasporic identities; subaltern struggles;
North-South relations; and environmental facets of globalization.
2) Health, science, environment
Nature is within us and all around us. Human habitats—starting with our multi-species
bodies—are only partly under human control. Inversely, the environment "out there"
is deeply influenced by humans and their technologies. We can find evidence for these
trans-human relationships in personal blood samples in addition to global measures
of carbon emissions, air temperatures, and sea levels. The history of this multi-level
interplay—from the molecular level to the planetary—is a rich area for interdisciplinary
scholarship. The nexus of bodies, scientific knowledge, and non-human things is even
more interesting because health and habitat are cultural ideas as well as biological
realities. Possible research topics include: Cultures of science; technology and technocracy;
the political ecology of urbanization; industrial pollution and environmental justice;
plants, animals, and pathogens as historical actants; disease in cross-cultural perspective;
public health in global perspective; and environmentalism(s) in comparative perspective.
3) Race, citizenship, migration
Race, citizenship, and migration intersect at moments of political, economic, and
social transformation. In such moments, various identities and forms of belonging—cultural,
racial, sexual, ethnic, linguistic, religious, national—become fluid and susceptible
to reformulation. Under this framework, such categories can be studied as historical
constructions that traverse borders, nations, and legal structures, thereby connecting
otherwise disconnected populations. This cluster emphasizes the ways that the state
bestows or denies people the privileges of citizenship based on their national or
ethnic background or their racialized or gendered status. Possible research topics:
Borders and borderlands; diaspora and transnational consciousness; migratory labor
and class mobility; regimes of citizenship exclusion (policing, detention, deportation,
incarceration, colonialism); social justice movements and civil rights; and politicized
ethnic movements.
4) Religion, gender, cultural identity
Cultural identity as expressed by religion, gender, sexuality, and race are powerful
shapers of action but are also historical artifacts that change over time. Religion—embodied
in texts, rituals, modes of dress and comportment, and architecture—operates to form
solidarities across borders and connect people across vast expanses of space, as well
as to create divisions and exclusions. Gender, as both an object of inquiry and a
category of analysis, identifies the personal in the political and examines the relationship
between bodies, society, and the cultural contexts that mediate between them. These
fields intersect with the history of ideas, politics, sexuality, and subjectivity.
Possible research topics include: Textual, material, visual, and sonic cultures; identity
politics and discourses of rights; affect and emotion; daily life and the family;
and cultural conflicts and reconciliations.
5) States, nations, political cultures
The nation-state may be today's dominant form of political organization and imagined
community, but historians see it as a relatively recent phenomenon. Taking state-building
and nationality as contested historical and cultural processes, this thematic triad
draws attention to earlier forms of political structures and affiliations—local communities,
dynastic states, empires, and so on—in addition to the emergence of modern states
and their distinctive forms of power and public culture. This theme brings into focus
the politics of contention within nation-making, as well as alternatives to the modern
nation, by seeing the state through the lenses of pre-modern and post-modern social
solidarities and/or non-modern communities and their political lives. Specific research
topics may include: War and society; law and sovereignty; democratic and social revolutions;
public and counter-public spheres; popular politics and civil society; post-colonialism
and nation-building; and non-state and stateless spaces.