School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 141-150 of 458 Results
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Jonathan Gienapp
Associate Professor of History and of Law
BioJonathan Gienapp is Associate Professor of History and Associate Professor of Law. He specializes in the constitutional, political, legal, and intellectual history of the early United States. His primary focus to date has been the origins and development of the U.S. Constitution, in particular the ways in which Founding-era Americans understood and debated constitutionalism across the nation's early decades. His historical interests intersect with modern legal debates over constitutional interpretation and theory, especially those centered on the theory of constitutional originalism.
His first book, *The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era* (Harvard University Press, Belknap, 2018), rethinks the conventional story of American constitutional creation by exploring how and why founding-era Americans’ understanding of their Constitution transformed in the earliest years of the document’s existence. It investigates how early political debates over the Constitution’s meaning altered how Americans imagined the Constitution and its possibilities, showing how these changes created a distinct kind of constitutional culture, the consequences of which endure to this day. It won the 2017 Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize from Harvard University Press and the 2019 Best Book in American Political Thought Award from the American Political Science Association and was a finalist for the 2019 Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians. In addition, it was named a *Choice* Outstanding Academic Title for 2019 and a 8Spectator USA8 Book of the Year for 2018.
His second book, 8Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique* (Yale University Press, 2024), mounts a comprehensive historical critique of originalism. It argues that recovering Founding-era constitutionalism on its own terms fundamentally challenges originalists' unspoken assumptions about the U.S. Constitution and its original meaning.
Gienapp's next book is on the forgotten history of the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution, currently entitled "We the People of the United States: The Struggle over Popular Sovereignty and Nationhood." It tells the story of the Preamble's early vitality and eventual descent into political and legal irrelevance as a way of exploring the broader struggle over popular sovereignty and national union in the early United States. It probes the often entwined debates over popular rule, sovereignty, federalism, and constitutionalism in the nation's earliest years to understand the full meanings of the Constitution's opening words: "We the People of the United States."
Gienapp has also published a range of articles, book chapters, and essays on early American constitutionalism, politics, and intellectual history, modern constitutional interpretation, and the study of the history of ideas.
He is a member of the Historians Council on the Constitution at the Brennan Center for Justice and has contributed to a number of historians' amicus briefs to the Supreme Court of the United States. He is also one of the founding editors of the Journal of American Constitutional History where he serves as a senior editorial advisor. -
Mario Alberto Gomez Zamora
Lecturer
BioMario A. Gómez Zamora is a scholar of queerness, gender and sexuality, migration, memory, Latinx and Latin American studies, dance and performance studies, and P’urhépecha studies. He earned his PhD and M.A. in Latin American and Latino Studies with emphasis in Anthropology at UCSC, a master’s in teaching history at Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, and a B.A. in Secondary Education with a concentration in History at Normal Superior Juana de Asbaje in Michoacán. Mario is a P’urhépecha and mestizo scholar (the son of a mestiza mother and a P’urhépecha father) originally from Tangancícuaro, Michoacán, where Mario was raised by his grandparents, aunties, and sister. For over a decade, Mario has collaborated with P’urhépecha youth and elders in the recollection of oral histories in his community of origin. One of these projects culminated in the publication of the multilingual book Entre el Recuerdo y la Memoria: Historias de Patamban (translated into P’urhépecha and English), which Mario edited.
As a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities and in the Department of Theater and Performance Studies, Mario is working on his book project Queer P’urhépecha Histories and Performances Beyond Borders, where he explores the cultural tensions that queer Indigenous P’urhépechas face when participating in their communities’ traditions and ceremonies in both sites of the border. Mario is receiving mentorship to complete his project from Dr. Jennifer DeVere Brody in TAPS. In the summer of 2025, Mario was a Chancellor's postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Anthropology at UCLA, where he received mentorship to advance his project from Dr. Jason De León. At Stanford University, Mario is teaching Intro to Dance Studies (winter) and his course Queer Indigenous Performances in the Americas (spring). His scholarship and poetry have been published by Wicazo Sa Review, Pasados, the Historical Institute of the University Michoacana Press, the Autonomous University of Nuevo León, Genealogy, and Los Angeles Review of Books. His last article, “Breaking Queer Silences, Building Queer Archives, and Claiming Queer Indigenous P’urhépecha Methodologies,” won the Most Thought-Provoking article in Native American and Indigenous Studies in 2025.
