History
Showing 101-200 of 256 Results
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Theresa Iker
Lecturer
BioTheresa Iker specializes in modern American politics, gender, and culture. She received her Ph.D. in History and minor in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (FGSS) from Stanford University in 2023, where she now serves as the Choi-Lam H&S Lecturer in Undergraduate Teaching. She offers courses in the Department of History and the Stanford Introductory Studies Program.
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Rachel Jean-Baptiste
Michelle Mercer and Bruce Golden Family Professor of Feminist and Gender Studies, Professor of History and of African and African American Studies
BioPh.D., Stanford University
M.A., Stanford University
A.B., Bryn Mawr College
Rachel Jean-Baptiste is a historian of 19th-21st century West and Equatorial Africa and the French-speaking Atlantic World. Her research interests include the histories of: marriage and family law; citizenship; urbanization; family and childhood; women, gender, and sexuality; colonialism; and race. -
Emerson Johnston
Master of Arts Student in History, admitted Winter 2025
Research Assistant for the Hoover Technology Policy Accelerator, HOOVER RESEARCHBioEmerson Johnston is a Research Assistant at the Hoover Institution’s Technology Policy Accelerator, where she works on the Stanford Emerging Technology Review and research related to emerging technologies and their impact on national security. She is currently on leave from Stanford’s MA program in the History of Science, Technology, Environment, and Medicine, where her thesis examines how institutional and historical legacies have shaped the framing of the internet as a telecommunications system rather than a civic or social space. More broadly, her research focuses on the sociocultural implications of digital platforms, algorithmic governance, and the intersection of technology and international policy. A first-generation, lower-income college student and a native of Los Angeles, California, she received an B.S. in ‘Politics, Philosophy, and Economics’ and in ‘History, Culture, and Law’, summa cum laude, from Northeastern University and an MA in International Policy from Stanford, where she is a Knight-Hennessy Scholar.
You can find more about her and her work on her website: https://www.emersonjohnston.org -
Burçak Keskin Kozat
Director of Finance & Operations, History Department
Current Role at StanfordDirector of Finance & Operations
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Nancy Kollmann
William H. Bonsall Professor of History
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsOctober 2018: In 2017 I published a synthetic history -- "The Russian empire 1450-1801" (Oxford). I am working on images of Russia in early modern Europe, generally by eyewitness travelers but also in the scurrilous penny press. I'm exploring how the tropes of engraving culture shaped images, how knowledge of Russia was disseminated and what image of Russia literate Europeans received. Then I'll return to the law -- Catherine II's 1772 judicial reforms on the local level across the Empire.
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Joaquín Lara Midkiff
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2025
BioJoaquín Lara Midkiff is a doctoral student studying as a Dean's Fellow in the Department of History focused on Indígena communities from Mexico and Central America in social and labor movements in the United States during the twentieth century. His earlier scholarship has centered on social histories of Oregon’s Indigenous migrant communities in the post-IRCA period.
Based in the Pacific Northwest, Joaquín comes from a family of working-class folks from Oklahoma and northern California and Nahua migrant farmworkers from Guerrero’s cohuixca. He served Oregon communities on public and non-profit boards, including Cherriots (Salem Area Mass Transit), the Oregon Disabilities Commission, and PCUN, Oregon’s farmworker union.
He has also contributed essays on houselessness, disability justice, and immigration that have appeared in the Oregonian, Truthout, and Yale Review of International Studies, among others, and poetry in The Future Lives in our Bodies (Abalone Mountain Press, 2022). -
Emily Jane Levine
Associate Professor of Education and, by courtesy, of History
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsCurrent research topics include a genealogy of academic concepts; the contemporary consequences of Germany and America’s divergent paths in knowledge organization; Jews and private philanthropy for scholarship; the historical tension between knowledge-for-its-own sake and applied knowledge; the global transfer of the kindergarten, mass schooling, and higher education; and the history and future of institutional innovation.
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Yoav Levinson-Sela
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2024
Reading Group Coordinator, History DepartmentBioYoav is a History Ph.D. student specializing in Early Modern Europe. His research focuses on the relationship between the production of knowledge and the moral communities of knowers sustaining them, particularly in northern German protestant universities and throughout the seventeenth- and eighteenth- centuries. More broadly, he is interested in the history of knowledge, the social and cultural history of science, the history of education, and the history of the book.
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Mark Lewis
Kwoh-Ting Li Professor of Chinese Culture, Emeritus
BioMark Edward Lewis’s research deals with many aspects of Chinese civilization in the late pre-imperial, early imperial and middle periods (contemporary with the centuries in the West from classical Greece through the early Middle Ages), and with the problem of empire as a political and social form.
His first book, Sanctioned Violence in Early China, studies the emergence of the first Chinese empires by examining the changing forms of permitted violence—warfare, hunting, sacrifice, punishments, and vengeance. It analyzes the interlinked evolution of these violent practices to reveal changes in the nature of political authority, in the units of social organization, and in the defining practices and attitudes of the ruling elites. It thus traces the changes that underlay the transformation of the Chinese polity from a league of city-states dominated by aristocratic lineages to a unified, territorial state governed by a supreme autocrat and his agents.
His second book, Writing and Authority in Early China covers the same period from a different angle. It traces the evolving uses of writing to command assent and obedience, an evolution that culminated in the establishment of a textual canon as the foundation of imperial authority. The book examines the full range of writings employed in early China, including divinatory records, written communications with ancestors, government documents, collective writings of philosophical traditions, speeches attributed to historical figures, chronicles, verse anthologies, commentaries, and encyclopedic compendia. It shows how these writings in different ways served to form social groups, administer populations, control officials, invent new models of intellectual and political authority, and create an artificial language whose mastery generated power and whose graphs become potent, almost magical, objects.
His third book, The Construction of Space in Early China, examines the formation of the Chinese empire through its reorganization and reinterpretation of its basic spatial units: the human body, the household, the city, the region, and the world. It shows how each higher unit—culminating in the empire—claimed to incorporate and transcend the units of the preceding level, while in practice remaining divided and constrained by the survival of the lower units, whose structures and tensions they reproduced. A companion volume, The Flood Myths of Early China, shows how these early Chinese ideas about the constituent elements of an ordered, human space—along with the tensions and divisions therein—were elaborated and dramatized in a set of stories about the re-creation of a structured world from a watery chaos that had engulfed it.
In addition to these specialist monographs, Lewis has written the first three volumes of a six-volume survey of the entire history of imperial China: The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han, China Between Empires: The Northern and Southern Dynasties, and China’s Cosmopolitan Empire: The Tang Dynasty. These volumes serve as introductions to the major periods of Chinese history for non-specialists, and as background readings to introductory surveys. In addition to recounting the major political events, they devote chapters to the most important aspects of the society of each period: geographic background, cities, rural society, kinship, religion, literature, and law.
He has published a new monograph, Honor and Shame in Early China, which traces evolving ideas about honor and shame in the Warring States and early empires in order to understand major developments in the social history of the period. It examines the transformation of elites and the emergence of new groups through scrutinizing differing claims to “honor” (and consequent re-definitions of what was “shameful”) entailed in claiming a public role without necessarily being a noble or an employee of the state. -
Martin Lewis
Senior Lecturer in History, Emeritus
BioMartin W. Lewis is a senior lecturer in international history at Stanford University. He graduated from UC Santa Cruz with a degree in Environmental Studies in 1979, and received a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in geography in 1987. His dissertation, and first book, examined the interplay among economic development, environmental degradation, and cultural change in the highlands of northern Luzon in the Philippines. Subsequently, he turned his attention to issues of global geography, writing (with Karen Wigen) The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (University of California Press, 1997). He is also the co-author of a world geography textbook, Diversity Amid Globalization: World Regions, Environment, Development (Prentice Hall), and is the former associate editor of The Geographical Review. Martin W. Lewis taught at the George Washington University and then at Duke University, where he was co-director of the program in Comparative Area Studies, before coming to Stanford University in the fall of 2002. He writes on current events and issues of global geography and at GeoCurrents.info.
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Courtney MacPhee
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2020
Peer Teaching Mentor, History Department
Workshop Coordinator, History DepartmentCurrent Role at StanfordCo-coordinator of the Religion, Politics, and Culture Workshop, sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center
Communications Coordinator of the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Stanford University
Graduate Mentor for Undergraduate Honors Thesis Writers -
Alison McQueen
Associate Professor of Political Science and, by courtesy, of History
BioAlison McQueen is the the Nehal and Jenny Fan Raj Civics Faculty Fellow in Undergraduate Teaching and an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. Her research focuses on early modern political theory and the history of International Relations thought.
McQueen’s book, Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times (Cambridge University Press, 2018), traces the responses of three canonical political realists—Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and Hans Morgenthau—to hopes and fears about the end of the world. A second book project, Absolving God: Hobbes’s Scriptural Politics, tracks and explains changes in Thomas Hobbes’s strategies of Scriptural argument over time. She is also working on treason and betrayal in the history of political thought. -
Ana Raquel Minian
Clifford G. Morrison Professor of Population and Resources Studies
BioAna Raquel Minian is an Associate Professor in the Department of History. Minian received a PhD in American Studies from Yale University. At Stanford University, Minian offers classes on Latinx history, immigration, histories of incarceration and detention, and modern Mexican history.
Minian's first book, Undocumented Lives: The Untold Story of Mexican Migration (Harvard University Press, 2018) received the David Montgomery Award for the best book in labor and working-class history, given jointly by the Organization of American Historians and the Labor and Working-Class History Association; the Immigration and Ethnic History Society’s Theodore Saloutos Book Award for an early career scholar’s work in immigration and ethnic history; the Western Association of Women Historians’ Frances Richardson Keller-Sierra Prize for best monograph in the field of history by a member; the Association for Humanist Sociology’s Betty and Alfred McClung Lee Book Award for best book in humanist sociology; and the Americo Paredes Book Award for Non-Fiction presented by the Center for Mexican American Studies at South Texas College. It was also a finalist for the Frederick Jackson Turner Award, given to the author of a first scholarly book dealing with some aspect of American history by the Organization of American Historians and received an honorable mention for the Latin American Studies Association’s Bryce Wood Book Award given to an outstanding book on Latin America in the social sciences and humanities published in English.
Minian's second book, In the Shadow of Liberty: The Invisible History of Immigrant Detention (Viking Press, forthcoming, April 2024) reveals the history of the immigrant detention system from its inception in the 1800s to the present. Braiding together the vivid stories of four migrants seeking to escape the turmoil of their homelands for the promise of America, the book gives this history a human face, telling the dramatic story of a Central American asylum seeker, a Cuban exile, a European war bride, and a Chinese refugee. As we travel alongside these indelible characters, In the Shadow of Liberty explores how sites of rightlessness have evolved, and what their existence has meant for our body politic. Though these “black sites” exist out of view for the average American, their reach extends into all of our lives: the explosive growth of the for-profit prison industry traces its origins to the immigrant detention system, as does the emergence of Guantanamo and the gradual unraveling of the right to bail and the presumption of innocence. Through these narratives, we see how the changing political climate surrounding immigration has played out in individual lives, and at what cost. But as these stories demonstrate, it doesn’t have to be like this, and a better way might be possible.
Additionally, Minian has published articles in the Journal of American History, American Quarterly, and American Historical Review.
In 2020, Minian was awarded with the prestigious Andrew Carnegie Fellowship.
Minian's third book project, "No Man’s Lands: A New History of Immigration Restriction," examines how during the late Cold War and its aftermath, U.S. officials created new spaces and territories designed to prevent Latin American and Spanish-speaking Caribbean migrants from entering the United States. Rather than a thought-out and coherent project, these various spatial enterprises were designed haphazardly in response to particular incidents and migrations. -
Yumi Moon
Associate Professor of History and, by courtesy, of East Asian Languages and Cultures
BioI joined the department in 2006 after I completed my dissertation on the last phase of Korean reformist movements and the Japanese colonization of Korea between 1896 and 1910. In my dissertation, I revisited the identity of the pro-Japanese collaborators, called the Ilchinhoe, and highlighted the tensions between their populist orientation and the state-centered approach of the Japanese colonizers. Examining the Ilchinhoe’s reformist orientation and their dissolution by the Japanese authority led me to question what it meant to be collaborators during the period and what their tragic history tells us about empire as a political entity. I am currently working on a book manuscript centered on the theme of collaboration and empire, notably in relation to the recent revisionist assessments of empire. My next research will extend to the colonial period of Korea after the annexation and will examine what constituted colonial modernity in people’s everyday lives and whether the particulars of modernity were different in colonial and non-colonial situations. To explore these questions, I plan to look at the history of movie theaters in East Asia between 1890 and 1945, a subject which will allow me to study the interactions between the colonial authority, capitalists and consumers, as well as to look at the circulation of movies as consumed texts.
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Thomas Mullaney
Professor of History and, by courtesy, of East Asian Languages and Cultures
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsThomas S. Mullaney is Professor of History and Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures, by courtesy. He is also the Kluge Chair in Technology and Society at the Library of Congress, and a Guggenheim Fellow.
He is the author or lead editor of 7 books, including The Chinese Typewriter (winner of the Fairbank prize), Your Computer is on Fire, Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China, and the forthcoming The Chinese Computer—the first comprehensive history of Chinese-language computing.
His writings have appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies, Technology & Culture, Aeon, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy, and his work has been featured in the LA Times, The Atlantic, the BBC, and in invited lectures at Google, Microsoft, Adobe, and more. He holds a PhD from Columbia University. -
Andrew Patrick Nelson
Ph.D. Student in Japanese, admitted Autumn 2018
Ph.D. Minor, History
Ph.D. Minor, LinguisticsBioI am a PhD Candidate in the Japanese Linguistics track of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. My research is motivated by two primary areas of inquiry: first, to what extent can methods in linguistic science be applied to historical documents to recover a speaker/writer intent and reader/listener interpretation? Second, in what ways are language changes perceived, categorized, and valorized; in what ways do those perceptions, categories, and values shape language ideology; and in what ways does language ideology in turn change language use? My work brings together methods in psycholinguistics, semantics, and pragmatics in analyzing texts on language written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with Japanese texts as a primary case study, but also leveraging sources in English, French, and German for a transnational perspective.
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Reviel Netz
Patrick Suppes Professor of Greek Mathematics and Astronomy and Professor, by courtesy, of Philosophy and of History
BioNetz's main field is the history of pre-modern mathematics. His research involves the wider issues of the history of cognitive practices, e.g. visual culture, the history of the book, and literacy and numeracy. His books from Cambridge University Press include The Shaping of Deduction in Greek Mathematics: a Study in Cognitive History (1999, Runciman Award), The Transformation of Early Mediterranean Mathematics: From Problems to Equations (2004), and Ludic Proof: Greek Mathematics and the Alexandrian Aesthetic (2009).
He is also the author of the translation and commentary of the works of Archimedes, also with CUP, a three-volume work of which the first has appeared, The Two Books on Sphere and Cylinder (2004). Together with Nigel Wilson, he prepares the edition of the recently rediscovered Archimedes Palimpsest (evidence from which already gave rise to two major discoveries: a text showing actual infinity in Archimedes, published in SCIAMVS 2001-2002, and a text showing, possibly, combinatorics in Archimedes, published in SCIAMVS 2004.) Two volumes, Transcription and Critical Edition, are forthcoming from the British Academy, of which the transcription is already available online. His popular book on the Archimedes Palimpsest Project, The Archimedes Codex, (co-authored with William Noel, Neumann Prize) was published by Widenfeld and Nicolson, 2007, and is translated into 20 languages.
Related to his research in cognitive history is his interest in ecological history, and he has published Barbed Wire: an Ecology of Modernity (Wesleyan University Press, 2004, finalist for PEN award). Reviel Netz is also a poet (Adayin Bahuc, 1999 Shufra: Tel Aviv, AMOS prize), one of a group of Hebrew poets active today whose work revives formal verse and he is the co-author, together with his wife, the Israeli author Maya Arad, of a collection of essays on Israeli literature, Positions of Stress (Meqom Hata'am, 2008 Axuzat Bayit: Tel Aviv). -
Kathryn Meyer Olivarius
Associate Professor of History
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI am an historian of nineteenth-century America, interested primarily in the antebellum South, Greater Caribbean, slavery, and disease. My research seeks to understand how epidemic yellow fever disrupted Deep Southern society. Nearly every summer, this mosquito-borne virus killed up to ten percent of the urban population. But it also generated culture and social norms in its fatal wake. Beyond the rigid structures of race and unfreedom in Deep Southern society, I argue there was alternate, if invisible, hierarchy at work, with “acclimated” (immune) people at the top and a great mass of “unacclimated” (non-immune) people awaiting their brush with yellow fever languishing in social and professional purgatory. About half of all people died in the acclimating process.
In New Orleans, alleged-imperviousness or vulnerability to epidemic disease evolved into an explanatory tool for success or failure in commodity capitalism, and a justification for a race- and ethnicity-based social hierarchy where certain people were decidedly less equal than others. Disease justified highly asymmetrical social and labor relations, produced politicians apathetic about the welfare of their poor or recently-immigrated constituents, and accentuated the population’s xenophobic, racist, pro-slavery, and individualist proclivities. Alongside skin color, acclimation-status, I argue, played a major role in determining a person’s position, success, and sense of belonging in antebellum New Orleans.
Most of all, disease provided the tacit justification for who did what work during cotton and sugar production, becoming the essence of an increasingly elaborate and tortuous justification for widespread and permanent black slavery. In the Deep Southern view, only enslaved black people could survive work like cane cutting, swamp clearing, and cotton picking. In fact, proslavery theorists argued, black slavery was positively natural, even humanitarian, for it protected the health of whites—and thus the nation writ large—insulating them from diseased-labor and spaces that would kill them.
By fusing health with capitalism in my forthcoming book Necropolis, I will present a new model—beyond the toxic fusion of white supremacy with the flows of global capitalism—for how power operated in Atlantic society.
I am also interested in historical notions of consent (sexual or otherwise); slave revolts in the United States and the Caribbean; anti- and pro-slavery thought; class and ethnicity in antebellum America; the history of life insurance and environmental risk; comparative slave systems; technology and slavery; the Haitian Revolution; and boosterism in the American West. -
Steven Press
Associate Professor of History
BioSteven Press is an Associate Professor of History and an affiliated member of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the Center for African Studies, and the Stanford Center for Law and History.
Press' first book, Rogue Empires: Contracts and Conmen in Europe's Scramble for Africa (published Spring 2017 with Harvard University Press), received the American Historical Association's Pacific Coast Branch Book Award.
Press' second book, Blood and Diamonds: Germany's Imperial Ambitions in Africa, appeared in 2021 with Harvard University Press. It received the German Studies Association's Barclay Book Prize and was named a CHOICE Outstanding Title.
In an article in the Journal of Modern History, Press explored the exchanges between Germany, China, and Cuba that led to the USA's lease for Guantanamo Bay in 1903. His article on post-Napoleonic European nationalism appeared in Central European History, as did a more recent article about Wilhelmine Germany's Weltpolitik.
Press graduated with a B.A. from Vanderbilt University and an A.M. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. He taught at Harvard and Vanderbilt before coming to Stanford. His research interests include European sovereignty, international relations, and commodity networks. -
Robert N. Proctor
Professor of History and, by courtesy, of Medicine (Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine)
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsTobacco and cigarette design; human origins and evolution; changing concepts of health and disease; medical history and medical politics
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Jessica Riskin
Frances and Charles Field Professor of History
BioJessica Riskin received her B.A. from Harvard University and her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. She taught at MIT before coming to Stanford, and has also taught at Iowa State University and at Sciences Po, Paris. Her research interests include early modern science, politics and culture and the history of scientific explanation.
Riskin is the author of Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (2002), which won the American Historical Association's J. Russell Major Prize for best book in English on any aspect of French history, and the editor of Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life (2007) and, with Mario Biagioli, of Nature Engaged: Science in Practice from the Renaissance to the Present (2012). She is also the author of The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Debate over What Makes Living Things Tick (2016), which won the 2021 Patrick Suppes Prize in the History of Science from the American Philosophical Society.
