WELCOME TO THE STONY BROOK INITIATIVE FOR HISTORICAL SOCIAL SCIENCES (IHSS)

EVENTS

We are a working group comprised of historians and sociologists who meet regularly to discuss various themes in the historical social sciences.

The group came into existence during the 2006/2007 academic year, thanks to a FAHHS Research and Interdisciplinary Initiatives Fund from the Office of the Provost at Stony Brook University. FAHSS is an initiative to encourage interdisciplinary dialogue, research, and teaching, in the Fine Arts, Humanities, and lettered Social Sciences at Stony Brook. Stony Brook hosts a significant cluster of historical sociologists, across both the Departments of History and Sociology and perhaps even beyond. The working group — which currently consists of 25 members, half of them faculty members and the other half advanced graduate students — has the potential to emerge as a leading site of innovation in the field, with palpable effects on graduate recruitment and training, and research orientations and funding.

Our long-term objective is to work towards the creation of a cross-disciplinary graduate and research program in what we term the “New Historical Social Sciences.” Historical Sociology in the United States had its formative era during the 1960s-80s when pioneers such as Charles Tilly and Theda Skocpol articulated its goals for use of historical evidence and long-term analysis to historicize, test or nuance modes of social analysis. There are still many practicing historical sociologists scattered about, producing rich works, but the field has not been revamped for the twenty-first century. Historians and sociologists have tended to regress to their own corners of the field–historians into archives and textual analysis, sociologists to refining theory, cases and comparison.

Yet since the 1990s both History and Sociology (as separate disciplines) have absorbed the retreat and return of “grand theory,” the Cultural and Interpretive turns, and new relational and reflexive paradigms, and globalization as fact and theory, which all necessarily impact the problems and sensibilities of Historical Sociology. Now, calls for “eventful sociology” and the “historical turn” are resonating again across the human sciences. It is time, we believe, to renovate this venerable intellectual project, and precisely on the basis of rarely-seen close collaboration between working historians and sociologists.

In addition to exploring cross-disciplinary dialogue between working historians and sociologists about the historical social sciences, one central objective of the working group is to develop specific proposals for joint seminars and integrated graduate training between the departments. A fair portion of the two departments’ graduate students are drawn to problems in historical social sciences. The History department’s thematically-restructured doctoral program has pushed faculty and students to rethink classical themes such as “nations and states,” “capitalism and modernity.” The new global thematic in Sociology also intensifies historical awareness and fieldwork, in a growing convergence with History.

Coordinators:
Paul Gootenberg (Professor, History)
Herman Lebovics (Distinguished Professor, History)
Daniel Levy (Associate Professor, Sociology)