School of Humanities and Sciences


Showing 1-10 of 15 Results

  • Courtney MacPhee

    Courtney MacPhee

    Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2020

    BioI am a 3rd year PhD candidate in History under the guidance of David Como. I focus on religious and cultural history of early modern Britain and am particularly interested in ideas of apocalypticism, millenarianism in the English Civil Wars and Revolution, radical sectarian notions of empire, and, more broadly, the messy dynamics between power and resistance in the seventeenth century.

    Prior to my time here at Stanford, I received my MA in History with a concentration in Museum Studies from Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, CA under the guidance of Lori Anne Ferrell. My master's thesis is titled "I will write of Cornwall, Cornhell in the West": Prophecy, Itinerancy, and Anna Trapnel's Struggle with Cromwellian Authorities.


    Doctoral Oral Examination Committee:

    Major Field: Early Modern Britain - David Como
    Major field: Modern Britain and its Empire - Priya Satia

    Minor field: Colonial America - Caroline Winterer
    Minor field: Early Modern Europe - Paula Findlen

    Exam Chair: Sarah Prodan

  • Alison McQueen

    Alison McQueen

    Associate Professor of Political Science and, by courtesy, of History

    BioAlison McQueen is 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.

    Her other ongoing research projects explore methods of textual interpretation, the ethics and politics of catastrophe, and treason in the history of political thought.

  • Ana Raquel Minian Andjel

    Ana Raquel Minian Andjel

    Associate Professor of History

    BioAna Raquel Minian is an Associate Professor in the Department of History. Her first book, Undocumented Lives: The Untold Story of Mexican Migration (Harvard University Press, 2018) explores how unauthorized migration from Mexico to the United States became an entrenched phenomenon in the years between 1965 and 1986. In this period, Mexican policymakers, US authorities, and Mexican communities of high out-migration came to reject the long-term presence of Mexican working-class men. In Mexico, the country’s top politicians began to view men’s migration with favor as a way of alleviating national economic problems. In the United States, migrants were classified as “illegal aliens.” Migrants’ permanent residence was also denied at the local level. When they resided in Mexico, their communities pressured them to head north to make money. But when they lived in the United States, their families insisted that they return home. As a result migrants described themselves as being “from neither here nor there” (“Ni de aquí ni de allá”). They responded to their situation by engaging in circular, undocumented migration and by creating their own cartographies of belonging. Migrants resisted the idea that they were superfluous in Mexico by becoming indispensable economic agents through the remittances they sent; they countered their illegality in the United States by establishing that they deserved constitutional rights; and they diminished the pressures enacted by their communities by reconfiguring the very meaning of community life. These efforts provided migrants with at least partial inclusion in the multiple locales in which they lived; however, that inclusion was only possible because they resided, at least part of their time, in the United States. In 1986, the US Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which made it more difficult to cross the border. By then, however, undocumented migration had already become a self-perpetuating phenomenon. Thereafter, migrants settled permanently in the United States and dared not return to Mexico. Rather than feeling “pushed” from all the spaces in which they resided, they now felt trapped in the United States, which they started calling “La Jaula de Oro” (The Golden Cage).

    A version of a chapter of my book entitled “De Terruño a Terruño: Re-imagining Belonging through Clubes Sociales,” was published in the Journal of American History in June 2017. It analyzes the growth of migrant organizations that sent aid to Mexico from Los Angeles between the early 1960s to the mid-1980s. Beyond work from my book, I also published “‘Indiscriminate and Shameless Sex’: The Strategic Use of Sexuality by the United Farm Workers” in American Quarterly in 2013. This article examines the ways in which the union used a sexual discourse to propagate its labor goals.


    Minian's second book project, No Man’s Lands: North American Migration and the Remaking of Peoples and Places, 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.

    Minian is also writing a history about immigration detention in the United States