School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 101-200 of 204 Results
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Nancy Kollmann
Professor, History
Professor, History Department
Emeritus Faculty, Academic Council, HistoryCurrent 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
Other Tech - Graduate, History DepartmentBioJoaquín Lara Midkiff is a doctoral student studying as Dean's Fellow in the Department of History at Stanford University whose scholarship focuses on the social and labor movements of Indigenous Mexican and Central American communities in the United States during the twentieth century.
His earlier work centered Mixteco and Triqui encounters with carcerality, pan-Indigenous coalition-building, and racialized agricultural labor in the Pacific Northwest during the late twentieth century.
His scholarship and commentary has been published or is forthcoming in the Western Historical Quarterly, Truthout, and The Oregonian, among others. His poetry appears in The Future Lives in Our Bodies (Abalone Mountain Press) and Crab Creek Review.
At Stanford, he has also received the Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education (EDGE) and Research, Action, and Impact through Strategic Engagement (RAISE) fellowships, and organizes the Latin American & Caribbean History Workshop (2026-27).
Joaquín lives with his family in Salem, Oregon, where he has served on various public and non-profit boards, including Cherriots (Salem Area Mass Transit), the Oregon Disabilities Commission, and PCUN, Oregon’s farmworker union. He earned his B.A. from Yale University. -
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
BioYoav 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. -
Courtney MacPhee
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2020
Other Tech - Graduate, 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. -
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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Emilee Quezada
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2026
BioEmilee Quezada is a first-year Ph.D. student in history, focusing on modern Latin American history, with an emphasis on twentieth-century Central America. Emilee is particularly interested in how student-led social movements and uprisings shaped revolutionary agendas, political transitions, migration, and transnational networks.
Prior to entering Stanford’s Ph.D. program, she earned a B.A. in History from UC Berkeley in 2024, where her research examined how a female combatant and commander in the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) established political legitimacy in post-war El Salvador. -
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. -
Janick Marina Schaufelbuehl
Affiliate, History Department
Visiting Scholar, History DepartmentBioJanick Marina Schaufelbuehl is an associate professor of history at the University of Lausanne. Her research focuses on the post-1945 history of international relations, with a particular interest in political history, the history of capitalism, the history of neoliberalism, economic history, and the history of the Cold War. She is the author of Crusading for Globalization: US Multinationals and Their Opponents (Pennsylvania University Press 2025). Janick Marina Schaufelbuehl was a research fellow at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en sciences sociales in Paris (2010-2011), a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2017-2018), a visiting scholar at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University (2019-2020) and at the European Institute of Columbia University (2021-2022), as well as a visiting professor at the Geneva Graduate Institute (2026).
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Walter Scheidel
Dickason Professor of the Humanities and Professor of History
BioPersonal website: http://www.walterscheidel.com
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Londa Schiebinger
John L. Hinds Professor of the History of Science
BioLonda Schiebinger is the John L. Hinds Professor of History of Science in the History Department at Stanford University and Director of the EU/US Gendered Innovations in Science, Health & Medicine, Engineering, and Environment Project. From 2004-2010, Schiebinger served as the Director of Stanford's Clayman Institute for Gender Research. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Professor Schiebinger received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1984 and is a leading international authority on gender in science and technology. Over the past thirty years, Schiebinger's work has been devoted to teasing apart three analytically distinct but interlocking pieces of the gender and science puzzle: the history of women's participation in science; gender in the structure of scientific institutions; and the gendering of human knowledge.
Londa Schiebinger presented the keynote address and wrote the conceptual background paper for the United Nations' Expert Group Meeting on Gender, Science, and Technology, September 2010 in Paris. She presented the findings at the United Nations in New York, February 2011 with an update spring 2014. In 2022, she prepared the background paper for the United Nations 67th session of the Commission on the Status of Women’s priority theme, Innovation and Technological Change, and Education in the Digital Age for Achieving Gender Equality and The Empowerment of all Women and Girls. Since 2023, Gendered Innovations has been a member of the UNFPA Equity 2030 Alliance.
In 2011-2014, Schiebinger entered into major collaborations with the European Commission and the U.S. National Science Foundation to promote Gendered Innovations in Science, Health & Medicine, Engineering, and Environment. This project draws experts from across the U.S., Europe, Canada, and Asia, and was presented at the European Parliament, July 2013 as Gendered Innovations: How Gender Analysis Contributes to Research. In 2018-2020, Schiebinger directed the European Commission Expert Group to produce Gendered Innovations 2: How Inclusive Analysis Contributes to Research and Innovation. Institutes for Gendered Innovations research opened in Soeul, South Korea, in 2015 and in Tokyo, Japan, in 2022.
Schiebinger’s work has been featured in Science: A Framework for Sex, Gender, and Diversity Analysis in Research: Funding Agencies Have Ample Room to Improve Their Policies (2022); Nature: Sex and Gender Analysis Improves Science and Engineering (2019); Nature: Design AI so that it's Fair (2018); Nature: Accounting for Sex and Gender Makes for Better Science (2020).
Her work in the eighteenth century investigates the circulation of knowledge in the Atlantic World. Her Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World reconceptualizes research in four areas: first and foremost knowledge of African contributions to early modern science; the historiography of race in science; the history of human experimentation; and the role of science in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Her prize-winning Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World investigates women's indigenous knowledge of abortifacients and why this knowledge did not travel.
Londa Schiebinger has been the recipient of numerous prizes and awards, including the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Research Prize and John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. She was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium (2013), the Faculty of Science, Lund University, Sweden (2017), and the University of Valencia, Spain (2018); the Berlin Falling Walls Breakthrough Winner in Science & Innovation Management (2022). Her work has been translated into numerous languages. In 2022/23, she served as an advisor to the Berlin University Alliance. -
Serena Shah
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2021
Stanford Stdnt Employee-Summer, 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. -
Partha Pratim Shil
Assistant Professor of History
BioI am an historian of modern South Asia, specializing in nineteenth and early twentieth century eastern India, with a developing research interest in the late eighteenth century. My work is located at the intersection of the fields of histories of state formation and labour history. I am particularly interested in the histories of government workers and how this labour history intrinsic to the state apparatus recasts our understanding of state formation.
I am currently working on the manuscript of my first book, provisionally entitled 'Sovereign Labour: Constables and Watchmen in the Making of the Modern State in India, c. 1860-1950'. This monograph is a study of police constables and village watchmen in Bengal from the promulgation of the Police Act in 1861 until the upheavals of decolonisation in the mid-twentieth century. It reframes the history of constables and village watchmen, usually represented as government functionaries, as the history of a distinctive form of labour.
The most important methodological innovation of this study is to bring methods from the historiography of labour in South Asia in conversation with the vast archive of the colonial police and to demonstrate how we can rewrite police history as labour history. Sovereign Labour charts the contours of the market of security labour in eastern India and locates the emergence of colonial police workforces within the rhythms of this labour market. It reveals the patterns in the history of constabulary recruitment; examines the implications of the conditions of police work for the nature of police power; delineates the internal segmentation within the world of police labour, and the defining role of caste in shaping modern policing apparatuses in colonial India; and brings out fresh evidence about the myriad modes of politics devised by police workers in this region. More broadly, my aim is to clear a conceptual ground for the study of forms of labour within the apparatuses of the modern state as well as demonstrate how the history of the labouring lives of government workers can provide a fresh entry point into the nature of the modern state in South Asia.
Before joining Stanford, I was a Junior Research Fellow in History at Trinity College, Cambridge. -
Kathryn Starkey
Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies and Professor, by courtesy, of English, of History and of Comparative Literature
BioKathryn Starkey is Professor of German in the Department of German Studies and, by courtesy, Professor of English, History, and Comparative Literature. Her work focuses primarily on medieval German literature from the eleventh to the thirteenth century, and her research topics encompass visuality and materiality, object/thing studies, manuscript illustration and transmission, language, performativity, and poetics. She has held visiting appointments at the Universities of Palermo (2011) and Freiburg im Breisgau (2013 and 2018).
Recent book publications (since 2012) include:
* Things and Thingness in European Literature and Visual Art, 800-1600, edited with Jutta Eming (Berlin/New York, 2021).
* Animals in Text and Textile. Storytelling in the Medieval World, edited with Evelin Wetter. Riggisberger Berichte, Vol. 24 (Riggisberg, Switzerland, 2019).
* Sensory Reflections. Traces of Experience in Medieval Artifacts, edited with Fiona Griffiths (Berlin/New York, 2018).
* Neidhart: Selected Songs from the Riedegger Manuscript, edited and translated with Edith Wenzel, TEAMS series in bilingual medieval German texts (Kalamazoo, MI, 2016).
* A Courtier’s Mirror: Cultivating Elite Identity in Thomasin von Zerclaere’s “Welscher Gast” (Notre Dame, 2013).
* Visuality and Materiality in the Story of Tristan, edited with Jutta Eming and Ann Marie Rasmussen (Notre Dame, 2012).
Professor Starkey is the PI for the Global Medieval Sourcebook (https://sourcebook.stanford.edu/) for which she received a NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant (2018) as well as awards from the Roberta Bowman Denning Fund for Humanities and Technologies at Stanford (2016, 2017, 2018).
Her current research projects include a co-authored (with Fiona Griffiths) textbook for the Cambridge Medieval Textbook series on A History of Medieval Germany (900-1220).
Professor Starkey has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Humanities Center, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the UNC Institute for the Arts and the Humanities, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC).
Before joining the faculty at Stanford in 2012 she taught in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. -
Adele Leigh Stock
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2020
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsHistory of environment, religion, and technology in 20c urban Africa
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Merve Tekgürler
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2019
Masters Student in Symbolic Systems, admitted Autumn 2023BioMerve Tekgürler is a PhD candidate in History (ABD) and an M.S. student in Symbolic Systems. In AY 2023-24, they hold the inaugural Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship. Merve has a BA degree in History and Social and Cultural Anthropology from Freie University Berlin and an MA in History from Stanford.
Merve’s dissertation, tentatively titled “Crucible of Empire: Danubian Borderlands and the Making of Ottoman Administrative Mentalities” focuses on the Ottoman-Polish borderlands in the long 18th century (1760s-1820s), examining the changes and continuities north of the Danube River in relation to Russian and Austrian expansions. They study Ottoman news and information networks in this region and their impact on production and mobilisation of imperial knowledge.
As part of their dissertation project, Merve is training a handwritten text recognition model for 18th century Ottoman Turkish administrative hand and developing AI-based natural language processing tools for Ottoman Turkish. Their aim is to compile a large machine-readable corpus of manuscript news communiques and employ computational text analysis methods. In AY 2022-23, they were a Digital Humanities Graduate Fellow at Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) with their project on topic modeling in Ottoman court histories from the 18th and 19th centuries.
Merve’s research on the borderlands ties to their passion for maps and spatial humanities. They are the co-PI in Cistern: A Database of Geographical Knowledge in the Ottoman World, which they started with Adrien Zakar in Winter 2020. They also contributed to their advisor Ali Yaycıoğlu’s Mapping Ottoman Epirus project, building a placenames dataset from an Ottoman transportation map and developing a 3D model of the late-nineteenth century Ottoman Empire with exaggerated elevation data.
Previously, Merve was a G.J. Pigott Scholar (AY 2022-23) and graduate coordinator of Stanford Humanities Center Eurasian Empires Workshop (AY 2021-22 & 2022-23). They also worked as senior graduate mentor for the Undergraduate Research Internship at CESTA from Spring 2021 to Fall 2022. Outside academia, Merve enjoys playing tennis, doing gymnastics, and all kinds of DIY projects. -
Fred Turner
Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication, Akiko Yamazaki and Jerry Yang University Fellow in Undergraduate Education and Professor, by courtesy, of Art and Art History and of History
BioFred Turner’s research and teaching focus on media technology and cultural change. He is especially interested in the ways that emerging media have helped shape American life since World War II.
Turner is the author of five books: The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties; From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism; Echoes of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory; Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside a Fraying America (with Mary Beth Meehan); and L'Usage de l'Art: de Burning Man à Facebook, art, technologie et management dans la Silicon Valley. His essays have tackled topics ranging from the rise of reality crime television to the role of the Burning Man festival in contemporary new media industries. They are available here: fredturner.stanford.edu/essays/.
Turner’s research has received a number of academic awards and has been featured in publications ranging from Science and the New York Times to Ten Zen Monkeys. It has also been widely translated.
Turner is also the Akiko Yamazaki and Jerry Yang University Fellow in Undergraduate Education. Before joining the faculty at Stanford, Turner taught Communication at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also worked as a freelance journalist for ten years and he continues to write for newspapers and magazines in America and Europe, including Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Turner earned his Ph.D. in Communication from the University of California, San Diego. He has also earned a B.A. in English and American Literature from Brown University and an M.A. in English from Columbia University. -
Jun Uchida
Asian Cultures and Society Professor and Professor of History
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMy current book project examines the diasporic history of Ōmi shōnin (merchant). Often compared to overseas Chinese and Jewish merchants, merchants of Ōmi (present-day Shiga prefecture) are famous for peddling textiles and other goods across the early modern Japanese archipelago. My aim is to trace their activities into the global age of capital and empire, from cotton trade and manufacturing in China to retail commerce in Korea and Manchuria, and immigration to North America.
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Zach Wallis
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2026
BioZach 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. -
Amir Weiner
Associate Professor of History
BioAmir Weiner’s research concerns Soviet history with an emphasis on the interaction between totalitarian politics, ideology, nationality, and society. His first book, Making Sense of War analyzed the role and impact of the cataclysm of the Second World War on Soviet society and politics. His current project, Wild West, Window to the West engages the territories between the Baltic and Black Seas that were annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939-40, from the initial occupation to present. Professor Weiner has taught courses on modern Russian history; the Second World War; the Origins of Totalitarianism; War and Society in Modern Europe; Modern Ukrainian History; and History and Memory.
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Karen Wigen
Frances and Charles Field Professor of History
BioKären Wigen teaches Japanese history and the history of cartography at Stanford. A geographer by training, she earned her doctorate at the University of California at Berkeley. Her first book, The Making of a Japanese Periphery, 1750-1920 (1995), mapped the economic transformation of southern Nagano Prefecture during the heyday of the silk industry. Her second book, A Malleable Map: Geographies of Restoration in Central Japan, 1600-1912 (2010), returned to the ground of that study, exploring the roles of cartography, chorography, and regionalism in the making of modern Shinano.
An abiding interest in world history led her to co-author The Myth of Continents (1997) with Martin Lewis, and to co-direct the "Oceans Connect" project at Duke University. She also introduced a forum on oceans in history for the American Historical Review and co-edited Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges (2007) with Jerry Bentley and Renate Bridenthal. Her latest project is another collaboration, Cartographic Japan: A History in Maps, with co-editors Sugimoto Fumiko and Cary Karacas ( University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2016). -
Caroline Winterer
William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies, Professor of History and, by courtesy, of Classics and of Education
BioCaroline Winterer is William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies, and Professor by courtesy of Classics. She specializes in American history before 1900, especially the history of ideas, political thought, and the history of science.
She teaches classes on American history until 1900, including American cultural and intellectual history, the American Enlightenment, and the history of science.
She is the author of six books, including most recently How the New World Became Old: The Deep Time Revolution in America (Princeton University Press, 2024).
She is currently accepting graduate students. For more information on the PhD program in the Department of History, visit: https://history.stanford.edu/academics/graduate-degree-programs. -
Mikael Wolfe
Associate Professor of History
BioI am a historian of modern Latin America whose work centers on the intersection of social, political, environmental, and technological change. In particular, I explore questions of water control, agrarian reform, and the effects of climate and weather on the process of social revolution. I employ interdisciplinary historical methods in my scholarship and teaching that seek to transcend the imaginary boundary between the human and nonhuman environments.
I teach undergraduate and graduate courses in modern Latin American history, historiography and film, history of US-Latin American relations, comparative history of modern Latin America and East Asia, environmental history of Latin America and the United States, climate ethics, and water history (see teaching tab to the right. I am accepting graduate students to work under me, but before contacting me, please become familiar with my work. Specific questions engaging with my work and how it relates to your own research interests are more fruitful as a basis for conversation than generally asking to learn more about my work.)
My first book, Watering the Revolution: An Environmental and Technological History of Agrarian Reform in Mexico (Duke, 2017; winner, 2018 Elinor K. Melville Prize for Latin American Environmental History; short-listed, 2018 María Elena Martínez Prize for Mexican History), investigates how people managed their water—via dams, canals, and groundwater pumps—in a great crucible of the Mexican Revolution of 1910-20, the arid north-central Laguna region. In so doing, it demonstrates how Mexican federal engineers were not merely passive implementers of large-scale state development schemes such as agrarian reform. Instead, to implement the latter, they actively mediated knowledge between state and society, identifying what they thought was technologically possible and predicting its environmental consequences.
The book also explains how engineers encountered an intrinsic tension between farmers’ insatiable demand for water and the urgency to conserve it. By closely examining how the Mexican state watered one of the world’s most extensive agrarian reforms, the book tackles an urgent question in the literature on postrevolutionary Mexican state formation, Latin American environmental history and history of technology, and global development studies: how and why do governments persistently deploy invasive technologies for development even when they know those technologies are ecologically unsustainable?
To answer this global question, my book integrates environmental and technological history along with social, economic, political, and legal analyses based on extensive research in archival sources, journals, newspapers, and government publications in Mexico and the United States. Using this “envirotechnical” analytical framework, the book uncovers the varied motivations behind the Mexican government’s decision to use invasive and damaging technologies despite knowing they were unsustainable.
My research on agrarian reform and water management in north central Mexico led me to investigate how weather shapes the process of social revolution across Cuba’s varied climates and environments. In my new book project, Rebellious Climates: How Extreme Weather Shaped the Cuban Revolutions, I combine environmental history and historical climatology to argue that extreme weather events such as drought and hurricanes were not merely infrequent external shocks to Cuba, quickly entering and exiting the main anthropocentric stage of its theater of revolution. Instead, these events were long enmeshed in Cuban politics, economics, society, and culture, and thereby shaped the origins and progression of the 1959 revolution in ways largely overlooked by historians.
