Greetings from the Chair

The department of history has been an active and innovative place in recent years, with new faculty hires adding to the strengths of an already productive and highly-regarded faculty of national and international renown, strongly committed both to research and teaching, a dramatically revised graduate program at the forefront of changes in the discipline, and an array of new named fellowships for graduate history students and scholarships and prizes for undergraduate history majors at all levels . We also house newly-designed programs in social studies education at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. In recent independent surveys, we have achieved exceptionally high rankings in faculty productivity, graduate student satisfaction, and excellence in undergraduate teaching, and individual faculty have won major awards and prizes for research and for teaching.

The department offers training in many fields, specializing in early American and Atlantic history, modern European colonialism, Latin America, modern U.S. history, women and gender, the history of the environment, with substantial offerings in Medieval and early modern Europe, East Asia, and Global History. At the same time, our new graduate 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. The principal themes we offer are “Women, Gender, Sexuality, and Reproduction”; “Nation State and Civil Society”; “Empire, Modernity, and Globalization”; and, our newest field, “Environment, Science and Health.” We are currently participating in the Carnegie Foundation Initiative on the Doctorate, where we have found that many other graduate programs are attempting to alter their programs in a manner very similar to those we have already established. For all of the changes we are a welcoming place for students, as reflected in the recognition we have attained for both graduate and undergraduate teaching and the strides we have made in creating awards and scholarships to assist students at all levels in completing their programs.

For further information, please feel free to contact me or one of the program coordinators listed below. We look forward to hearing from you.

Ned Landsman
Professor and Chair

Graduate Coordinator: Frances Arnetta Undergraduate Coordinator: Susan Grumet

Department of History
Third floor, Social and Behavioral Sciences Building
State University of New York
Stony Brook, NY 11794-4348

Department phone: (631) 632-7500
Department fax: (631) 632-7367

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