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DEPARTMENTAL NEWS

Keynote Speaker Event

NSGAO 


Stony Brook Humanities Institute Event

Event


History Club Trivia Night!

Trivia Night


Long Island Migrant Labor Camps: Dust for Blood

LACS


Roundtable: After Trump

After Trump

 The History Club hosted  a roundtable on 10, March  2021 about the historical significance of the Capitol Riots.


History Department Colloquia

Spring 21 Colloquia

Featured two presenations for the Spring 2021 semester, by José Miguel Munive Vargas on 05, March 2021, and Zinnia Capo-Valdivia on 23 March 2021.


Maurie McInnis (University President)

President McInnis

The History Department welcomes as our newest Professor of History, Dr. Maurie McInnis, the sixth president of Stony Brook University.  A renowned cultural historian and author, McInnis’ academic scholarship has focused on race, slavery, and power in the American South. She has published extensively on American art history, including five books, most recently Educated in Tyranny: Slavery at Thomas Jefferson's University (2019). McInnis recently served as executive vice president and provost for the University of Texas at Austin, after teaching Art History for two decades at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville.


Zoom Talk: Career Options for History Majors

Career Talk


 History Club Event

History Club Talk


MLA presentation

Hosted by the Library, short presentations from scholars in History, English, and Hispanic Languages & Literature based on their participation in the 2021 meetings of the Modern Language Association and the American Historical Association.  Participants from the History Department include Herman Lebovics (Emeritus) and Eric Zolov.  


Talk by Professor Tomes!

Pandemic Talk


Logo Contest

Logo Contest


Catherine Lugar (PhD alumni) 
photo
Sadly we note and celebrate the life of alumna Catherine Lugar (PhD, 1980) who passed away from Covid-19.  A remembrance can be read  here.


The Mexican Restaurants of New York City  website is ready!

This project, put together by professor Lori Flores and PhD candidates Ximena López and Fernando Amador, maps the presence of Mexican cuisine in NYC during the last couple of decades. Visit the site here


22 May 2020 — Prof. Shobana Shankar's project, “Adapting Social Behaviors during the Ebola and COVID-19 Emergencies: A Household-Level Analysis from the West African Region” has been selected for an Office of the Vice President for Research & the Institute for Engineering-Drive Medicine COVID-19 Seed Grant.

22 May 2020 — Erica Mukherjee ('19) just won a position as a postdoctoral fellow in the History Department at NYU-Shanghai for the 2020-21 academic year (Global Perspectives on Society Teaching Fellow).


22 May 2020 — Prof. Eric Zolov's monographThe Last Good Neighbor: Mexico in the Global Sixties was just published by Duke University Press.


22 May 2020 — David Yee ('19) has secured a tenure-track job at Metropolitan State University of Denver, Colorado beginning in the fall. He also recently published a (second) entry for the on-line Oxford Encyclopedia of Latin America History, this time for their series on Digital Resources: "Housing and Urban Development in Latin American History."


18 May 2020 — Prof. Shirley Lim is a featured commentator in the PBS documentray series entitled Asian Americans. Dr. Lim is featured in Part I, entitled "Breaking Ground & A Question of Loyalty." The link to the series can be found on PBS's website here.


18 May 2020 — Prof. Shobana Shankar has published an article in the Washington Post on the Mississippi prison system. The article can be found here.


8 May 2020 — Prof. Chris Sellers has published his important report for the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative. The full report can be found here on the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative website.


29 April 2020 — Kevin Murphy (PhD Candidate) has won a four-month fellowship at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, AY 2020-21, for his dissertation "Coercion and Sworn Bond in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic."


20 April 2020 — Prof. Joshua Teplitsky was interviewed by Times Higher Education on the historcial precedents of pandemics.


16 April 2020 — Lorna Ebner (PhD Student) has published a highly relevant blog post entitled "Quarintine in Nineteenth-Century New York" for the New York Academy of Medicine.


6 April 2020 — Prof. Jennifer Anderson  has won the ultra competitive Mellon/ACLS Scholars and Society Fellowship!  She'll be working next year on "Jupiter Hammon's Long Island: Land, Labor, and Power in the Making of a Region," at Preservation Long Island.


30 March 2020 — Yalile Suriel (PhD Candidate) won the AERA Minority Dissertation Fellowship in Education Research! This highly selective national prize provides a year of dissertation support as well as a range of wonderful mentoring activities.


14 February 2020 — Prof. Chris Sellers received university-wide recognition after testifying before the United States House Comittee on Energy and Commerce. Prof. Sellers has founded the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative to properly achive all documents related to climate change and improve environmental data stewardship.


7 February 2020 — Prof. Shirley Lim appeared on the podcast Mobituatries discussing  trail-blazing Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong. Mobituries was ranked by Time Magazine as a Top Ten Podcast, with over one million subscribers.


26 January 2020 — Prof. Lori Flores appeared on CNN for an interview regarding the public controversy surrounding "American Dirt."


16 January 2020 — Prof. Joshua Teplitsky'sPrince of the Press (Yale University Press 2019) has been named a finalist in the 2019 Jewish National Book Awards.


5 December 2019 — We're proud to share that our undergraduate major Tyler Rodriguez ('19) has published both a review and an article (on genocide in colonial Yucatan) in a peer-reviewed history journal.


4 December 2019 —Yalile Suriel (PhD Candidate) has published an article entitled "What SUNY Albany Tells Us About the Policing of University Space" in Activist History.


2 December 2019 — The Russell Sage Foundation has awarded Prof. Lori Flores a fellowship for the 2020–21 academic year as part of its prestigious Visiting Scholars Program.


2 December 2019 — Prof. Rob Chase has been selected by the College of Arts and Sciences to convene an Inaugural Research group on "Caging Borders and Crimmigration: Global Incarcerations, Migrant Detentions, and Deportation."


7 November 2019 — From his desk as a Fulbright Scholar in Santiago, Prof. Eric Zolov has posted in The Nation his observations on the political crisis in Chile.


5 November 2019 — Ximena Lopez Carrillo has won a Guiliano Global Fellowship. Congratulations, Ximena!


24 October 2019 — Congratulations to Matías Hermosilla, whose paper "Poeta Ho Chi Minh: Third-Worldism, Solidarity, and Chilean Protest Songs during the Global 1960s" was awarded Honorable Mention at the Middle Atlantic Council of Latin American Studies Conference.


22 October 2019 — The Journal of Urban History has published an article from Ph.D. alumnus Neil Buffett: "Crossing the Line: High School Student Activism, the New York High School Student Union, and the 1968 Ocean Hill-Brownsville Teachers’ Strike."


12 October 2019 — Will Mack (PhD Candidate) has written a timely blog post for the Society for U.S. Intellectual History: "Race and Policing: The Contradiction of Liberal Multi-Culturalism."


11 October 2019 — Matthew Ford (PhD Candidate) has published an online essay for Public Seminar: "I Ain't Gonna Work on Merritt's Farm No More."


26 August 2019 — Prof. Paul Kelton appeared on C-Span's "Back to School Week": a recording of his class received regular airtime from August 26–September 1.


25 July 2019 — Andrés Estefane (PhD, '17) has been promoted to director of CEHIP (a center for political history) at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez in Chile, and elected president of the Chilean Association of Historians.


20 July 2019 — Prof. Paul Gootenberg has been named president-elect of the Alcohol and Drugs History Society.


2 July 2019 — Congratulations to Kelly Jones  ('17) who has accepted a Visiting Assistant Professor position at Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi.


30 June 2019 — Congratulations to Ashley Black ('17) who has secured a tenure-track post in Latin American History at California State University-Stanislaus. 


19 June 2019 — Congratulations to Erica Mukherjee (PhD; defending July 2019) on her appointment as Visiting Assistant Professor of South Asian History at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hil. 


9 June 2019 — Prof. Shobana Shankar's insightful article drawing lessons for the U.S. measles crisis from Nigeria was just published in The Conversation


29 April 2019  — Congratulations to David Yee (PhD Candidate) on securing a post-doctoral fellowship at the Center for Western Civilization, Thought, and Policy at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His time will be devoted to revising his dissertation, "Divided Landscapes in the Mexican Metropolis: Housing and Segregation in Mexico City, 1940–1976."


25 April 2019  — We're excited to learn that this summer Fernando Amador (PhD student) will be working with the Reinvestment Fund, a non-profit research organization in Philadelphia dedicated to improving the quality of life in low-income neighborhoods. His project involves assessing the community impacts of libraries and museums to enhance their effectiveness through more informed public policies.


22 April 2019 — Congratulations to Aishani Gupta (PhD Candidate) on receiving SBU's new Guiliano Global Fellowship! She will be heading to India to pursue research for her disseration, “The Shrine’s City: British Colonial Ajmer, 1800–1947,” about the urbanization of Ajmer, a prominent Sufi pilgrimage center.


20 April 2019 — Congratulations to Prof. Eric Zolov on the award of a Fulbright Scholar Teaching Fellowship for Fall 2019. He will offer a graduate course on “The Global Sixties” at the Pontificia Universidad Católica in Santiago, Chile.


19 April 2019 — Congratulations to Kevin Murphy (PhD candidate) on receiving the New England Regional Consortium Fellowship to pursue research on his dissertation entitled, “Coercion and Sworn Bond in the 18th-century British Atlantic.” Kevin also recently presented his work at Cambridge University. 


17 April 2019 — Congratulations to Lance Boos (PhD candidate) on receiving research support from the American Antiquarian Society, the Omohundro Institute, and the Library Company for his dissertation entitled, "Print and Performance: The Development of a British Atlantic Musical Marketplace in the 18th Century."


16 April 2019 — Congratulations to Prof. Chris Sellers on winning the 2019 Alice Hamilton Award from the American Society for Environmental History for his article, "To Place or Not to Place: Toward an Environmental History of Modern Medicine," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 92, no. 1 (2018): 1-45.


15 April 2019 — Congratulations to Yalile Suriel (PhD candidate) on receiving the 2019 Dean's Alumni Association Leadership Award, which recognizes graduate students for their contributions to the University community. She will be honored at the Graduate School's Annual Awards Ceremony on May 22, 2019. Thanks for all your efforts, Yalile!  


9 April 2019 — Congratulations to Matthew Ford  (PhD candidate) on receiving a Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council for his dissertation, "Contested Rule in the Internal Colony: Indians, Elites, Missionaries, and the State in Ecuadorian Amazonia." Since the early 1990s, our students have won 21 SSRC Fellowships—making our department one of the country's leading SSRC recipients.


5 March 2019 — Prof. Josh Teplitsky has won a pair of residential writing fellowships for 2019–20, one at the Katz Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, another at Center for Judaic Studies at Harvard University.


21 February 2019 — The Washington Post has published an op-ed by Matthew Heidtmann (PhD candidate), whose expertise is U.S. political history: "Progressives, Beware Centrists' Attempts to Co-opt Your Message." 


1 February 2019 — Caroline Propersi-Grossman (PhD candidate) has contributed a scholarly blog post on New York City labor history: "One Hundred Years of Equity Strikes and Labor Solidarity."


29 January 2019 — Prof. Lori Flores has just published "The United Farm Workers Union and the Use of Boycotts against American Agribusiness," in the edited volume Boycotts: Past and Present (Palgrave). In addition, her 2017 article "Seeing Through Murals: The Future of Latino San Francisco" is set to be published in German translation in Technopolis.   


24 January 2019 — The Medieval Academy of America has elected Prof. Sara Lipton as a lifetime fellow. This is one of the highest honors in the field of medieval studies.


19 December 2018 — Justin Williams ('11) has received tenure at CUNY's Center for Worker Education, Department of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences. Also, James Nichols ('12) has received tenure at Queensboro Community College (CUNY). Congratulations, Justin and James!


14 December 2018 — Congratulations to Prof. Joshua Teplitsky on the publication of his new book: Prince of the Press How One Collector Built History’s Most Enduring and Remarkable Jewish Library.


10 November 2018 — Congratulations to Prof. Wilbur Miller on the publication of his new book: A History of Private Policing in the United States.


10 November 2018 — Prof. Donna Rilling's work on an African American burial ground at UPenn has helped designate the site for historic preservation.


9 November 2018 — Prof. Paul Kelton was installed as inaugural holder of the Robert David Lion Gardner Endowed Chair in American History. Congratulations, Prof. Kelton! 


29 October 2018 — Prof. Sara Lipton was quoted in an article discussing political rhetoric and rising antisemitism.


17 October 2018 — Prof. Sara Lipton has published an essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books


1 October 2018 — David Purificato (PhD candidate) has published an article in the journal, Libraries: Culture, History, and Society. 


27 September 2018 — "History Highlights: Graduate Student Research" exhibit opened. The exhibit features work from graduate students in the department. 


19 September 2018 — Mia Brett (PhD candidate) has published an essay in Rantt Media 


17 September 2018 — Prof. Lori Flores has published an op-ed in the Washington Post 


30 August 2018 — Congratulations to Prof. Shobana Shankar on the publication of her co-edited volume, Transforming Africa's Religious Landscapes: The Sudan Interior Mission (SIM).


28 August 2018 — Congratulations to Mark Rice ('14) on the publication of his new book, Making Machu Picchu: The Politics of Tourism in 20th-century Peru (University of North Carolina Press, 2018). Mark is Assistant Professor of Latin American History at Baruch College.


30 July 2018 — Sung Yup Kim ('16) is newly appointed Assistant Professor of History at Seoul National University. Congratulations Sung Yup! 


16 July 2018 — Raquel Otheguy ('16)  has accepted a position as Assistant Professor of History at Bronx Community College. Congratulations Raquel! 


1 July 2018 — Congratulations to James D. Nichols ('12) whose new book, The Limits of Liberty: Mobility and the Making of the Eastern U.S.-Mexican-U.S. Border, has just been published by Nebraska University Press. A preview is available here. James is Assistant Professor of History at Queensborough Community College (CUNY).


29 June 2018 — Congratulations to Prod. Paul Gootenberg and Prof. Liliana DáValos (Ecology & Evolution), editors of The Origins of Cocaine: Peasant Colonization and Failed Development in the Amazon Andes, 1950-1990, just published by Routledge. The volume includes a chapter by Maria Clara Torres (PhD candidate), about the coca frontier in Colombia. 


1 May 2018 — Congratulations to PhD candidate Matt Ford upon winning an Academy of American Franciscan History Dissertation Fellowship for his work on the Ecuadorian Amazon. 


27 April 2018 — The Rockefeller Foundation has awarded Prof. Lori Flores an Academic Writing Fellowship (2019) at the Bellagio Center for her project "Latino Food Workers and Their Struggles for Justice in the U.S. Northeast, 1940 to the Present."


25 April 2018 — The American Academy in Berlin has awarded Prof. Jared Farmer a Berlin Prize, which entails a residential fellowship in Germany in spring 2019.


25 April 2018 — Fernando Amador (PhD student) has won the Urban Leaders Fellowship, which will allow him to spend seven weeks in New Orleans this summer working on social justice programs with non-profits and local governments. Congratulations!


21 April 2018 — Congratulations to Gregory Rosenthal ('15), recipient of Honorable Mention for the G. Wesley Johnson Award for best article in Public Historian, for "Make Roanoke Queer Again: Community History and Urban Change in a Southern City."


9 April 2018 — Congratulations to Gonzalo Romero Sommer (PhD candidate), the department's latest winner of a SSRC International Dissertation Research Fellowship—a hyper-competitive award—for his research on the politics of Peruvian electrification projects. Felicitaciones!


9 April 2018 — Prof. Larry Frohman has won a Visiting Scholar fellowship for 2018–19 at Harvard University's Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, where he will finish his manuscript on the German surveillance state.


6 April 2018 — Ashley Black ('18) secured a position as Visiting Assistant Professor at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon.


4 April 2018 — The Washington Post interviewed Prof. Chris Sellers for an analysis of leadership at the Environmental Protection Agency.


1 April 2018 — SBU's College of Arts and Sciences awarded Prof. Lori Flores its Outreach Excellence Award.


28 March 2018 — Prof. Abena Asare (affiliated faculty, Africana Studies) won a fellowship at the prestigious Scholars-in-Residence Program at the NYPL Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture for 2018–2019. 


27 March 2018 — Congratulations to Kevin Murphy (PhD candidate), who has received a fellowship from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) to do research in Ireland for his dissertation: "Coercion and Sworn Bond in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic."


20 March 2018 — The University of London's Queen Mary Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences will host Prof. Sara Lipton as Distinguished Visiting Fellow in April 2019. 


6 February 2018 — Congratulations to Kelly Jones (PhD candidate) on the publication of a special issue of Asian Review of World Histories that she helped organize: "Globalization and the Exchange of Medical Knowledge and Practice in Asia." Kelly co-authored the introduction and has a featured article on acupuncture. ​ 


6 February 2018 — Prof. Jared Farmer was profiled in the Chronicle Review for his research on ancient trees and climate change.


1 February 2018 — Prof. Lori Flores published an article on a new Dutch policy that has dangerous echoes of the historical persecution of Zoot Suiters in Public Seminar


9 January 2018 — Congratulations to Carlos Gómez (PhD candidate), who has received a fellowship at the Center for the History of Global Development, Shanghai University, for his research on dam-building in Paraguay/Brazil.


8 January 2018 — The magazine American Scholar profiled Prof. April Masten research on "challenge dancing."


12 December 2017 — Prof. Nancy Tomes was interviewed on WNYC's The Takeaway for a segment called "Healthcare Insecurities Keep Workers Locked in Jobs." She also recently received a grant from the Foundation for Excellence in Mental Health Care to make a documentary film with director Lucy Winer.


11 December 2017 — Stony Brook's Department of Athletics honored Prof. Eric Beverley with the "MVP" (Most Valuable Professor) Award for his mentoring of student athletes.


5 December 2017 — Prof. Chris Sellers co-authored a summary of his important collaborative work in public policy: "Environmental Data and Governance in the Trump Era."


1 December 2017 — For the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, Prof. Lori Flores has written a blog post about injustice in the food system: "Our Thanksgiving Meals Are Eaten, But the Fight for Farm Workers' Rights Is Still on the Table."


19 November 2017 — Prof. Chris Sellers highlighted the innovative work of SBU's Center for the Study of Inequalities, Social Justice, and Policy in a blog post relevant to Long Islanders: "Storms Hit Poorer People Harder, from Superstorm Sandy to Hurricane Maria."


30 October 2017 — As part of Hispanic Heritage Month, Stony Brook University honored the following: Prof. Lori Flores won the Faculty Recognition Award for excellence in mentoring and outreach to the Latino community; Prof. Eric Zolov won the Los Padrinos Award for quality-of-life contributions to Latino students; and doctoral student Yalile Suriel won the Community Service Award.


24 October 2017 — Prof. Jared Farmer recently did public outreach related to California: TV appearances on episodes 2.2 and 2.3 of Lost L.A., plus a blog post related to the documentary; an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times; and quotations in a Times feature article.  


3 October 2017 — For Hispanic Heritage Month, the MTA's Long Island Railroad invited Prof. Lori Flores to speak to its employees about the history of Mexican, Bahamian, and Puerto Rican guest-workers in their industry.


24 September 2017 — La República, a major newspaper in Perú, ran an extensive review/interview about the new Peruvian edition of Prof. Paul Gootenberg's book on Andean cocaine. 


8 September 2017 — Drawing on her expertise in Caribbean studies, Prof. Jennifer Anderson wrote a commentary for Fortune about Hurricane Irma.


29 August 2017 — Prof. Lori Flores has been appointed inaugural Writer-in-Residence at Glynwood Farm, located in Cold Spring in the Hudson Valley. Glynwood offers short-term residencies to writers and journalists who wish to write articles, op-eds, or non-fiction works related to food and farming issues in the region.


28 August 2017 — Erica Mukherjee (PhD candidate) was awarded the British Association for South Asian Studies Annual Prize for best graduate student paper at their annual conference. Erica received the prize for her paper "The Impermanent Settlement: Bengal's Riparian Landscape, 1793–1845."


25 August 2017 — Prof. Brooke Larson's first book, Colonialismo y Transformacion Agraria en Boliviawas recently re-published in a Bolivian bicentennial collection of scholarly books. The collection is part of the Bolivian government's effort to make classic scholarly works available to a new generation.


12 August 2017 — For a front-page story on the Environmental Protection Agency, the New York Times interviewed Prof. Chris Sellers, who also has an essay in Vox about his interview project with EPA employees


25 May 2017 — Stony Brook University has appointed Prof. Paul Kelton to be the inaugural Robert David Lion Gardiner Chair in American History. The Department is thrilled to welcome Kelton and his family to Long Island.


17 May 2017 — David Yee (Ph.D. candidate) wrote an essay for The Metropole, the blog of the Urban History Association: "The Radiant City: Public Housing in Modern Mexico."


11 May 2017 — The Department singled out the following PhD students for its annual awards: Eron Ackerman (writing fellowship); Ashley Black (best dissertation chapter); Michael Conrad (writing fellowship); Matthew Heidtmann (best T.A.); Kelly Jones (innovation in teaching); Kevin Murphy (research award); and Emmanuel Pardo (research award). Congratulations to all!


9 May 2017 — Stony Brook's Center for Inclusive Education gave its 2017 Scholar Award for Excellence to PhD candidate Aishah Scott.


1 May 2017 — PhD candidate David Purificato has published an article in Past Tense Journal. He also won the Graduate Student Organization of Stony Brook University's Emerging Leader Award. 


26 April 2017 — The Carnegie Corporation of New York named Prof. Jared Farmer as one of the 2017 class of Andrew Carnegie Fellows


24 April 2017 — PhD candidate Gonzalo Romero won the James R. Scobie Award from the Conference on Latin American History for his preliminary dissertation research on hydroelectricity and state power in Peru.


22 April 2017 — In an Earth Day op-ed for Vox, Prof. Chris Sellers explains "How Republicans Came to Embrace Anti-Environmentalism."


4 March 2017 — PhD candidate Richard Tomczak won a Fulbright Canada fellowship! During his scholarly sojourn he will be affiliated with the University of Ottawa, doing research at the Library and Archives Canada and the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec.


2 March 2017 — PhD candidate Sergio Pinto-Handler won the 2017–18 African and African Diaspora Studies Dissertation Fellowship from Boston College for his work on transatlantic histories of abolition and the Brazilian abolition debate in the nineteenth century. Congratulations!


28 March 2017 — The National Public Radio program Here and Now interviewed Prof. Nancy Tomes on the origins of the U.S. health care system.


24 March 2017 — Prof. Shobana Shankar has been awarded a research fellowship from AFRASO, a German-funded initiative that focuses on the complexity of African-Asian interactions in "Afrasian spaces." Glückwünsche!


14 March 2017 — Fantastic news: As reported in the New York Times, Prof. Nancy Tomes won the Bancroft Prize—one of the most prestigious awards in U.S. history—for her recent book, Remaking the American Patient


13 March 2017 — PhD candidate David Yee received the SBU Faculty-Staff Dissertation Fellowship Award to support his archival research in Mexico.


4 March 2017 — Prof. Lori Flores received the happy news that Grounds for Dreaming has won the Best First Book Award from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society. This annual prize for early career scholars recognizes best book on any aspect of the immigration and ethnic history of the U.S. and/or North America. Mazel tov!


27 February 2017 — Back in 2012, Gregory Rosenthal (PhD, '15) published an article in Environmental History called "Life and Labor in a Seabird Colony: Hawaiian Guano Workers, 1857–1870." Now, five years later, Gregory's article has been selected for inclusion the 40th Anniversary Virtual Issue of the journal as an example of "path-breaking scholarship that has shaped our field."


19 February 2017 — Congratulations to newly minted PhD Ying-Ying Chu ('16), who has found full-time employment as an assistant professor of history at National Taipei University.


1 February 2017 — A new Spanish edition of Prof. Paul Gootenberg's Andean Cocaine (UNC Press, 2009) was recently released in Peru, and has now been named one of the "Top 10 Books" of 2016 in Peruvian history.


23 January 2017 — As part of its program to promote public understanding of science and technology, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has awarded Prof. Jared Farmer a grant toward his next book—a study of our long-term relationships with long-lived plants.


18 January 2017 — Prof. Sara Lipton has been elected to serve a three-year term as Councilor of the Medieval Academy of America. This is a major honor from the preeminent U.S. society for medieval studies. Macte hac gloria!


9 January 2017 — Recent PhD alumna Nichole Prescott ('15) has landed a great job: Assistant Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. In her new position, Prescott will focus on helping minority and underrepresented students succeed in college.


7 December 2016 — For the New York Times, Prof. Chris Sellers has written an op-ed called "Will the Next Deepwater Horizon Be in Mexico?"


11 November 2016 — In the Boston Review, Prof. Robert Chase has a review essay called "Slaves of the State: Prison Uprisings and Lessons of Attica."


11 November 2016 — Kelly Hacker Jones, PhD candidate, has been chosen to present a paper at an international conference on "Gender and Pain in Modern History" at University of London in 2017. Jones's paper is called "Strong Relief for Little Pains: OTC Analgesics and Depictions of Pain, 1950–1990."


4 November 2016 — Prof. Lori Flores has contributed a how-to blog entry called "From Dissertation to Book: Writing a Book Proposal."


6 October 2016 — Prof. Sara Lipton has written an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books on anti-Semitic imagery and the U.S. presidential election.


26 September 2016 — PhD candidate Erica Muhkerjee has won a prestigious and highly competitive Fulbright-Hays award for doctoral dissertation research abroad. She will do research in India and England for her project "Imagined Infrastructure: Railways, Embankments, and Canals in Colonial Bengal, 1820–1860."


9 September 2016 — Congratulations and felicitaciones to Prof. Lori Flores for winning the prize for best history book from the 2016 International Latino Book Awards.


10 August 2016 — As part of its Public Scholars Program, the National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded Prof. Jared Farmer a grant to write a book for the general public on the problem of long-term thinking in a time of rapid environmental change. 


29 July 2016 — Prof. Lori Flores's book, Grounds for Dreaming, has been featured on Process: A Blog for American History (a joint project of the OAH, the JAH, and The American Historian).


27 July 2016 — The online edition of CNN has run an op-ed by Prof. Robert Chase titled "How Can We End the Cycle of Racial Violence?"


1 July 2016 — For this coming academic year, Prof. Joshua Teplitsky has won two visiting fellowships, one at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, another from the Yad Hanadiv/Beracha Foundation Programme in Israel.


7 June 2016 — The Western Association of Women Historians has awarded Prof. Lori Flores an Honorable Mention for the Gita Chaudhuri Book Prize (for best book on the history of women in rural environments in any era and region of the world) for Grounds for Dreaming.


31 May 2016 — Parissa Djangi (PhD candidate) has received the highly competitive North American Council on British Studies Dissertation fellowship for 2016–17. 


9 May 2016 — Prof. Jennifer Anderson has won the John Murrin Prize from the McNeil Center for Early American Studies for the best article in Early American Studies. Her article, "A Laudable Spirit of Enterprise: Renegotiating Land, Natural Resources, and Power on Pre-Revolutionary Long Island," appeared in the spring 2015 issue.


6 May 2016 — Prof. Kathleen Wilson has been named Distinguished Professor, the highest faculty rank in the SUNY system. She is the fifth member of the department to earn this promotion. 


12 April 2016 — Stony Brook's College of Arts & Sciences has presented Prof. Jennifer Anderson an Outreach Award for her collaborative work with local and regional museums and education groups.


7 April 2016 — The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has released a podcast of an interview with Prof. Sara Lipton on the history of anti-Semitism in Christian art, and the the larger relationship between images of intolerance and acts of hatred.


28 March 2016 — Prof. Lori Flores recently appeared on a C-SPAN segment regarding new research on the history of Mexican-American civil rights.


16 March 2016 — Congratulations to recent PhD graduate Dexter Gabriel, who has accepted a tenure-track position at the University of Connecticut. Gabriel's dissertation, "A West Indian Jubilee in America," examines the effect of abolitionism and emancipation in the British Empire on the free black community in the antebellum United States. 


8 March 2016 — Prof. Eric Beverley has been interviewed about his new book by a prominent South Asian history blog.


24 February 2016— Charles Conti, class of '16 and the most recent recipient of the department's annual Catherine Wang Award, has been highlighted by Stony Brook Alumni for his outstanding undergraduate research.


3 February 2016 — Our recent graduate Dr. Gregory Rosenthal (now a tenure-track assistant professor at Roanoke College) has been awarded the 2016 Rachel Carson Prize for best dissertation in environmental history. The American Society for Environmental History singled out Rosenthal's doctoral thesis, "Hawaiians who Left Hawai'i: Work, Body, and Environment in the Pacific World, 1786–1876," for its excellence in writing, research, documentation, analysis, and overall contribution to the field.


25 January 2016 — The New York Times has glowingly reviewed Remaking the American Patient: How Madison Avenue and Modern Medicine Turned Patients into Consumers, the new book by Prof. Nancy Tomes.


25 January 2016 — Prof. Chris Sellers provides a deep-context explainer in his online essay, "Piping as Poison: The Flint Water Crisis and America's Toxic Infrastructure."


14 January 2016 — In a podcast from the "Farm Report" (a program about current issues in agriculture produced by the Brooklyn-based Heritage Radio Network), Prof. Lori Flores discusses her new bookGrounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement.


11 December 2015 — In today's New York Times opinion page, Prof. Sara Lipton explores the historical relationship between hate speech and violent acts: "The Words That Killed Medieval Jews."


23 November 2015 — Prof. Elizabeth Newman is the winner of the James Deetz Book Award from the Society of Historical Archaeology for her book Biography of a Hacienda: Work and Revolution in Rural Mexico.


15 November 2015 — In an op-ed for the Detroit Free Press, Prof. Lori Flores explains how "legal loopholes put lives of migrant workers at risk."


12 November 2015 — The American Jewish Studies Association has awarded the 2015 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award in the category of Cultural Studies and Media Studies to Prof. Sara Lipton for her book Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Jewish Iconography


4 November 2015 — In a op-ed for CNN, Prof. Chris Sellers, a leading expert on the history of industrial pollutants, reminds us that even today "lead threatens health of millions of Americans."


2 November 2015 Recent B.A. graduate Jonathan Lewis (Class of '11) has written a blog essay for the American Historical Association called "From History to Logistics: How My Degree in History Helps My STEM Career."


28 September 2015 — Congratulations to recent PhD Michael Murphy, who has secured a full-time position in the Office of the Historian of the U.S. House of Representatives. The position primarily involves the production of oral histories.


24 September 2015The History Department is pleased to be co-hosting a special conference organized by Prof. Robert Chase, "From the Color Line to the Carceral State," to be held October 27. The event is free and open to the public.


21 September 2015 — Prof. Joshua Teplitsky has co-organized a colloquium, "Cultures of Communication," on the history of the book. The colloquium includes a series of seminars and lectures with distinguished scholars. For the fall 2015 calendar, click here.


9 September 2015 — Process, the blog of the Journal of American History, has interviewed Prof. Robert Chase about his recent JAH article on the prisoners' rights movement and how it contributes to the contemporary debate over how to dismantle the carceral state (aka the "prison-industrial complex"). Another high-ranking journal, The Journal of Urban History, has its own special issue on "Urban American and the Carceral State," which features a new article by Prof. Chase.


8 September 2015 — This academic year, the History Department and the Latin American & Caribbean Studies Center are proud sponsors of the New York City Workshop on Latin American History (NYCWLAH). This seminar brings together graduate students and faculty from Stony Brook, Columbia, NYU, CUNY, and the New School. Contact David Yee to join the mailing list or to receive pre-circulated papers. Click here for the schedule.


8 September 2015 Froylán Enciso, a doctoral student from Mexico, recently published a book, Nuestra Historia Narcotica: Pasajes para (Re)legalizar las Drogas en México (Our Drug History: Passages to (Re)legalise Drugs in Mexico). The book has attracted a great deal of media attention both within and outside Mexico, including The Independent and the Spanish-language edition of Newsweek.


1 September 2015 — For the website PopMatters, Prof. Lori Flores analyzes the portrayal of California Latinos in the recently concluded second season of HBO's True Detective. 


28 August 2015 — In the latest New York Review of Books, Prof. Sara Lipton offers an illustrated review essay on Jewish visual art, "Books of Jewish Beauty."


20 June 2015 — Prof. Robert Chase appeared on WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show to discuss the church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, and the legacy of the Confederate flag.


18 June 2015 — The Journal of American History has released a new special issue, "Historians and the Carceral State," including an article by Prof. Robert Chase. In recognition of the immediacy of the topic, the issue has been made free to the public.


12 June 2015 — Recent PhD graduate Clarence Jefferson Hall, author of the dissertation "Prisonland: Environment, Society, and Mass Incarceration on New York’s Northern Frontier, 1845–1999," has been interviewed by the New York Times, National Public Radio, CNN, and other news outlets in regard to the recent prison outbreak in upstate New York. 


31 May 2015 — Newly graduated doctorate Gregory Rosenthal has accepted a tenure-track faculty position at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia.


20 May 2015 — Prof. Nancy Tomes has been promoted to Distinguished Professor, the highest professorial rank in the SUNY system.


29 April 2015 — Twelve of our undergraduate students presented original research at the annual History Department Undergraduate Conference, part of the University-wide URECA Celebration. With subjects ranging from Aztec rituals to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, the students offered lively accounts of archival sleuthing and surprising results, and demonstrated their mastery of the techniques of history scholarship.


22 April 2015 — The Organization of American Historians has given the Ray Allen Billington Prize to Prof. Jared Farmer for his book Trees in Paradise: A California History. The Billington Prize is a biennial award for the best book about American frontier history, which is defined broadly to include the pioneer periods of all geographical areas, and comparisons between American frontiers and others.


19 April 2015 — Prof. Eric Zolov appeared as a guest specialist on the cable news program Fresh Outlook to discuss the removal of Cuba from the U.S. State Department's list of sponsors of international terrorism.


14 April 2015 — Congratulations to PhD candidate María-Clara Torres Bustamante, who won a 2015 Inter-American Foundation (IAF) Grassroots Development Field Research Fellowship for her dissertation, "Coca in Colombia: The Roots of an Illegal Peasant Crop, 1950–1995."


31 March 2015 — Congratulations to PhD candidate Erica Mukherjee, who has been awarded a Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship for 2015–16. The grant will support nine months of research in India for her dissertation project, "The Real and Imagined Environments of the Colonial Indian Railways."


23 February 2015 — Prof. Lori Flores was recently interviewed on the television news program Fresh Outlook on the subject of U.S. immigration policy.


20 January 2015 — Prof. Nancy Tomes appears as a "talking head" in the documentary film The Forgotten Plague: Tuberculosis in America, which airs on the PBS series American Experience on February 10.


18 January 2015 — The recent resumption of U.S. diplomatic relations with Cuba motivated Prof. Eric Zolov to pen an op-ed, "Let’s Revisit Helms-Burton," which appeared in the Huffington Post series "90 Miles: Rethinking the Future of U.S.-Cuban Relations."


15 January 2015 — As Boko Haram continues its deadly campaign, Prof. Shobana Shankar explores parallels between Boko Haram and other marginalized groups in the history of northern Nigeria.


18 November 2014 — This past week Prof. Jared Farmer went to Dallas, Texas, to pick up the Hiett Prize in the Humanities—a prestigious national award—and separately received the news that his book Trees in Paradise won the Charles A. Weyerhaeuser Award from the Forest History Society.


14 November 2014 — On the heels of a New York Times profile of Prof. Sara Lipton and her new book, Dark Mirror, on anti-Semitism in medieval art, the New York Review of Books and Religion Dispatches have published related essays by her.


5 November 2014 — In an online essay, Prof. Chris Sellers puts the recent People's Climate March in New York City in historical perspective.


3 November 2014 — Prof. Joshua Teplitsky has published an op-ed for the Jewish Daily Forward on contemporary lessons that can be drawn from the quarantine of Jews during Europe’s final outbreak of plague in 1713. 


21 October 2014 — As a counterpoint to sensational news coverage of the ebola outbreak in west Africa, Prof. Nancy Tomes discusses the history of "germ panic" in a timely interview with Popular Science. 


July 2014 —  Maria-Clara Tores (PhD student) has been awarded a Tinker Pre-Dissertation Field Work Grant from the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center at Stony Brook University. 


19 May 2014 — Recently graduated doctorate Eric Cimino has accepted a tenure-track faculty position at Molloy College, Rockville Centre, New York.


29 March 2014 — PhD candidates Ashley Black and Andrew Ehrinpreis both received dissertation fellowships from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). Black's research concerns Mexico City as a site of Latin American exile in the 1950s. Ehrinpreis's project is "Constructing Coca: A History of Bolivian Coca Nationalism and the War on Drugs, 1920–2000." 


25 March 2014 — PhD candidate Gregory Rosenthal has won a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship for his project, "Hawaiians Who Left Hawaii: Work, Body, and Environment in the Pacific World, 1786–1876." 


15 February 2014 — Prof. Jared Farmer's latest book, Trees in Paradise: A California History, has won the John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize from the Foundation for Landscape Studies. In addition, Prof. Farmer recently wrote an op-ed on the controversy surrounding non-native eucalyptus trees in California.


3 September 2013 — Prof. Chris Sellers has written a blog entry for Dissent on Mexican President Peña Nieto’s proposed "energy reform," in light of Seller's own research into the recent history of Pemex's environmental impacts.


July 2013 —  Maria-Clara Tores (PhD student) has been awarded a Tinker Pre-Dissertation Field Work Grant from the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center at Stony Brook University. 


17 June 2013 — The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation (dedicated to studies of violence and violence prevention) has awarded PhD candidate Froylán Enciso a fellowship for his dissertation, "Made in Sinaloa: From the Regional to the Global History of the Mexican War on Drugs, 1909–1985."


17 May 2013 — Ying-Ying Chu (PhD candidate) has won Taiwan’s year-long Academia Sinica fellowship to support her dissertation research and writing about Peruvian social sciences and the national question from the 1950s to the 1970s.


8 May 2013 — Prof. Paul Gootenberg has been promoted to the rank of Distinguished Professor by the SUNY Board of Trustees. Distinguished professorships are reserved for scholars who have achieved national or international prominence in their field.


3 May 2013 — Erica Mukherjee (PhD candidate) has just received a Cornell University Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) fellowship and will use it to study Bengali at the South Asia Summer Language Institute at the University of Wisconsin this summer. 


26 April 2013 — Prof. Chris Sellers has written a online blog entry for the journal Dissent, reflecting on recent industrial disasters in Texas and Bangladesh, and drawing on his edited volume Dangerous Trade: Histories of Industrial Hazard across a Globalizing World.


25 April 2013 — Later this spring, PhD candidate Gregory Rosenthal will join eleven other scholars from across the country to participate in the Cornell University Institute for the Social Sciences' 2013 Institute on Contested Landscapes. Gregory also received two dissertation research awards for this summer and fall—one from the Huntington Library, another from the Bancroft Library.


25 April 2013 — Raquel Otheguy (PhD candidate) has been awarded the National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship for her dissertation project, "Education in Nation, Empire, and Diaspora: Afro-Cubans from 1878 to 1920."


23 April 2013 — Froylán Encisco (PhD candidate) has won a year-long pre-doctoral residential fellowship at the U.S.-Mexico Studies Center at UC-San Diego, where he will complete his dissertation on the local and global origins of drug trafficking in Sinaloa, Mexico.


22 April 2013 — Carlos Gomez Florentin (PhD candidate) has been awarded the 2013 Social Science Research Council’s International Dissertation Research Fellowship (IDRF) funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Florentin's research focuses on the unintended environmental, social, and political consequences of dam-building for mid twentieth-century Paraguay and Brazil.


7 March 2013 — Prof. Wolf Schäfer has won a residential fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin, for his project "Finalization and Failure: A Comparative Management Study of Big Weapons Programs in World War II."


17 March 2013 — The online journal Common-place recently released a special issue, "Music and Meaning in Early America," which features the article "Partners in Time" by Prof. April Masten. Drawing on her new research, Prof. Masten discusses affinities between African American and Irish jigs, and the methodological challenges of interpreting the history of dance.


22 February 2013 — Prof. Sara Lipton serves as consultant for and appears in a new documentary, Jews & Money, released by Emmy-award winning filmmaker Lewis Cohen. The film traces the age-old stereotype of the rich Jew, from medieval moneylenders to Nazi propaganda to international capitalism. The first showing is at the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival this month. 


22 January 2013 — Prof. Nancy Tomes appears on This American Life, a weekly radio show that airs on more than 500 stations to about 1.8 million listeners, plus up to 700,000 podcast downloads. Tomes offers her views on the "Petticoat Affair" involving Andrew Jackson's cabinet members and their wives.