Since 2000, Stacy Sewell has been teaching courses in 20th century American history particularly as it relates to the histories of race, politics, and the built environment. She is interested in studying how cities have transformed since World War Two, and the meanings and memories former and current residents have about the places they live or have left. Currently she is working with a team of historians on a project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities to create a public-facing website on the history of urban renewal in New York State.
In her courses at STAC, Dr. Sewell and her students explore how the intersections of race, place and geography have informed activism and social movements. In her courses on the History of the 1960s, City and Suburb in America, and the Civil Rights Movement, students examine a wide range of sources to understand how Americans of earlier eras understood their rapidly changing neighborhoods and communities.
Dr. Sewell is also an Assistant Dean in the School of Arts and Social Sciences. She directed STAC’s Bachelor’s program at Sullivan Correctional Facility, which, she writes, was a wonderful means by which STAC fulfilled its mission to help all students to realize their potential.
Stacy Sewell received her bachelor’s degree from Eugene Lang College of the New School for Social Research in New York City and her Ph.D. in History from Rutgers University.
Larry J. Hackman Research Residency, New York State Archives, 2016.
Faculty Development Grant, St. Thomas Aquinas College 2013.
Kerr Prize for New York History 2003.
HIST 316 City and Suburb in America
This course examines the evolution of the United States from a rural and small-town society to an urban and suburban nation. The class will explore the growth of city and suburb as interrelated processes, which involve the creation of physical infrastructures as well the construction of imagined and idealized social spaces. Themes to be discussed are the impact of industrialization, immigration and internal migration, the onset of racial and urban problems, the formation of new and distinctive urban subcultures, the problems of health and housing, and corrective public policies from the 19th century to the present.
HIST 314 The 1960s
This course examines the politics, culture and society of the period and focuses upon the many conflicts over cultural authority and political legitimacy, between the forces of order, consensus, and containment and those of protest, resistance, and liberation. Topics will include the cold war, civil rights, the student movement, the Vietnam War, sexual liberation and the counterculture. Students explore multiple documentary sources such as oral history, music, documentary and feature films, newspapers and artifacts to understand how issues raised in the 1960s are still polarizing and playing themselves out in our politics and culture.
HIST 315 American Women’s History
Have women’s status and position in American society simply progressed and improved over time, or is this history more complicated? Students in this course will scrutinize widely-held presumptions of women’s progress over time. We will explore the means by which women’s rights and sphere of activity have been transformed since colonial times, and how with the enlargement of women’s rights and independence also came conflict and controversy. The course will explore the conflicts embedded in the suffrage and reform movements, friction between women of different classes and generations, and the difficulties that have accompanied women’s attempts to balance work and home life.
HIST 345 Colonial and Postcolonial Vietnam
This course is designed to bring together the histories of colonialism, nationalism, and anti-communism, using Vietnam as a focal point. From the French colonial experience to the rise of Vietnamese resistance and United States’ intervention, this course will compare and contrast the ways in which the peoples and nations involved–the dominant and the subjected–understood their roles and viewed their struggles. Students will examine the views of colonial administrators, Vietnamese nationalists, and American policymakers to uncover how the historical actors regarded one another. They will also examine popular views of struggles over Vietnam in the media, in literature, and in films.