The Stony Brook Initiative in Historical Social Sciences (IHSS) was founded in 2007 to foster ongoing conversations and collaboration between historians and social scientists.  Start-up support was provided by the FAHSS interdisciplinary research program of the Office of the Provost.  In some ways, we hope to rekindle the kind of creative joint thinking about social theory and historical research that marked the Historical Sociology of the 1970s and 1980s. However, since then both fields have been transformed by interpretive, reflexive, and cultural turns, as well as new topics (such as inequalities and capitalism) and approaches (such as transnationalism and cosmopolitanism) that renew possibilities for intellectual convergence.  Big theory has come and gone and is seemingly seeping back in newer ways.  Many historians are eager to rethink “social” or structured dimensions of the past and some social scientists are eager to go beyond the ahistorical social theories of recent decades.

The IHSS draws some two dozen faculty and graduate students from History and Sociology and other allied fields.  Over the past decade the IHSS has sponsored a works-in-progress discussion workshop that regularly meets 2 to 3 times per semester.  The IHSS Workshop mixes new Stony Brook faculty research with visits by innovative outside distinguished figures in the field, including Julia Adams, Karen Barkey, George Steinmetz, and Partha Chatterjee.

Our Stony Brook host departments—History with its thematic focus, Sociology with its global focus—are well suited to this project. In the long run, we hope to articulate with like-minded groups and dialogues beyond the New York region, build continuing institutional support, and advance our shared trans-disciplinary training of doctoral students drawn into the new historical social sciences.