Latin American history is a thriving regional concentration at Stony Brook, long recognized as one of the top Ph.D. training centers in the field. Since 2000, twenty-five students have defended dissertations on Latin American topics, and many of these doctorates have gone on to hold important teaching and research posts across the Americas. Our students win a notable share of international fellowships for doctoral research, such as SSRC-IDRF fieldwork and Fulbright grants.

Latin American History enjoys the leadership of internationally-renowned professors:

—Lori Flores (U.S.-Mexico borderlands, Latinos)
—Paul Gootenberg (Peru, commodities, drugs)
—Brooke Larson (Bolivia, colonialism, ethnicity)
—Elizabeth Newman (Mexico, historical archeology, material culture)
—Eric Zolov (Mexico, popular culture, Global Sixties, U.S.-Latin American relations)

Students can expect to work closely with other faculty with related expertise:   

—Jennifer Anderson (slavery and commodities in the Caribbean)
—Ian Roxborough (labor, war and the military, Latin America)
—Chris Sellers (trans-border U.S.-Mexico environmental and labor history)
—Kathleen Wilson (imperial history of the Caribbean)

Our students also collaborate with distinguished Latin Americanist scholars in other departments such as Sociology and Hispanic Languages, via the cross-disciplinary Latin American & Caribbean Studies Center (LACS), which is housed in the History Department. LACS offers Tinker Fellowships for summer travel research. Stony Brook doctoral students meet regularly with peers from Columbia, NYU, and other New York area universities through a class consortium program and through the monthly seminars of the New York City Workshop on Latin American History, currently (2015–17) hosted at Stony Brook-Manhattan. Students have ample opportunity for developing teaching skills in summer and adjunct posts, and participate in an annual international Latin Americanist graduate conference organized by LACS. Stony Brook's program in Latin American history is distinctive for bringing young historians from across Latin America—Peruvians, Argentines, Chileans, Colombians, Mexicans, among them—together with peers from North America to create a vibrant collegial community. Moreover, each student, regardless of their country or topical specialization, develops close-knit mentoring relationships with our professors, who foster interpretative, comparative, and methodological skills for new and critical perspectives on Latin American history.

Stony Brook's many accomplished graduates in Latin American history include Sergio Serlunikov (Universidad de San Andrés, Argentina); Ariel de la Fuente (Purdue University); Cecilia Méndez (UC Santa Barbara); Alexander Dawson (Simon Fraser University); Martin Monsalve (Universidad de Pacífico, Lima); Susan Gauss (SUNY Albany); Brenda Elsey (Hofstra University); Juan Pablo Artinian (Di Tella Institute, Argentina); Kevin Young (UMass Amherst); and Mark Rice (Baruch College, CUNY).