School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 21-24 of 24 Results
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Serena Shah
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2021
GRAD Research Assistant, History DepartmentBioI am a PhD candidate in U.S. History. I study the history of ideas and the production of knowledge in our major cultural institutions, especially universities and museums. I specialize in the history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
My dissertation, "American Orientalism and Liberal Education: Building Moral Responsibility in the Gilded Age," examines an early defense of liberal education mounted by scholars at elite research universities after the Civil War. These scholars, who called themselves "orientalists," invented the idea of “Western civilization" and argued that the origins of the West lay in the ancient Orient (the region roughly corresponding to the modern Middle East). In an age of moral crisis, orientalists and academic leaders made the case that it was the role of the university to train the nation’s young people in an unbroken story of human progress, and to create responsible, informed citizens capable of participation in a functioning democracy.
I also study Americans' ideas about antiquity more broadly in the long nineteenth century. I am in the process of publishing a research article on Greek and Roman slave-naming practices and the classicism of American slavery. The study centers around a database of tens of thousands of slave names that I have compiled from archives across the American South. -
Zach Wallis
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2026
Other Tech - Graduate, History DepartmentBioZach Wallis is a PhD student in the Department of History in the field of British history. His research focuses on political economy, energy, and the environment in Australia, New Zealand, and the Southwest Pacific in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He is especially interested in understanding how conjoined political-economic and environmental transformations across the Pacific in this period prefigured the Great Acceleration in significant ways. Some of his other research interests include the environmental history of the First World War, historical theory, and theories of socio-metabolism.
Before coming to Stanford, Zach earned a B.A. in history from McGill University, a Master of History from the Australian National University, and a M.A in history from the University of Chicago. His dissertation at the University of Chicago, which won the Raymond D. Fogelson Thesis Prize, was a study of settler ecological thinking in late nineteenth century New Zealand. He has also previously undertaken research into late nineteenth and early twentieth century Australian intellectual history, and he has been published on the topic in History Australia.
