The Department of History, Graduate Studies Program, is a community of faculty members and graduate students within the University's College of Arts and Sciences. Each year we admit 9 to 12 students into the doctoral program and 4-6 students into the terminal master’s program. The department currently has approximately 100 full- and part-time graduate students. While the department has strength in
a number of traditional areas of historical study, it also has a long tradition of comparative, interdisciplinary, and theoretically informed research. The graduate program has been structured around four areas of thematic inquiry—1) Empire, Colonialism, and Globalization; 2) Nation-State, Civil Society, and Popular Politics; 3) Environment, Health, Science, and Technology; and 4) Gender, Race, and Sexuality—to bring these theoretical issues to the fore and insure that our students learn how 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. To further these interests, the department maintains close connections with the Stony Brook Humanities Institute, the doctoral program in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, the Women’s Studies Program, Africana Studies, the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program, and the Center for Global History, as well as the departments from which these programs draw their core faculty. The master’s program, which requires students to complete 30 credits of graduate study with a grade of B or higher, allows students to explore the history and historiography of their chosen area of concentration. Students in the master’s program follow the same basic course of study as that followed by doctoral students during their first year, and the oral examination serves as the capstone experience for the master’s program. program is designed to prepare students to carry out original research and to ultimately pursue a career at the university level. Doctoral students may choose to focus their study on a particular region and period or they may concentrate in one of the thematic areas of study described above, and all students are encouraged to work with faculty in other departments. Full-time students in the doctoral program typically take courses for their first six semesters in the program and take their Oral Examinations at the end of their third year.
