School of Humanities and Sciences
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William Tanner Allread
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2019
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsIndigenous History, U.S. Legal History, History of U.S. Empire, Federal Indian Law, Tribal Law, Law of the Territories, Race and the Law, Constitutional Law, Property Law, Environmental Law
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Mathew Ayodele
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2022
Ph.D. Minor, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality StudiesBioMathew Ayodele is a PhD student in the Department of History at Stanford University. His research interest focuses on the Colonial and Postcolonial Histories of Africa, particularly the religious, gender, and medical history in West Africa. He is primarily interested in interrogating the social history of medicine, medical pluralism, Christian missionaries' interplay, and reproductive health in colonial and postcolonial Nigeria. Mathew is also interested in women's sports history within the context of gender, religion, and media politics in the late 20th century in Nigeria.
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Nora Elizabeth Barakat
Assistant Professor of History
BioI am a historian of the late Ottoman Empire and the Modern Middle East. My research focuses on people, commodities and landscapes in the interior regions between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I have a particular interest in how legal categories of population, property and economy shaped and were shaped by the everyday experiences of social life. I am also committed to bringing both the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East into discussions of world history, especially narratives about capitalism and modern state formation. I teach courses on modern Middle East history, capital and crisis, Islamic law, and environmental history.
My current book project, Bedouin Bureaucrats: Nomads and Property in the Ottoman Empire, examines the ways tent-dwelling inhabitants of the Syrian interior contributed to and contested attempts to transform the desert fringe into a grain-exporting breadbasket in the second half of the nineteenth century. The project locates the experience of the Ottoman Syrian interior in a global context of commercial and administrative expansion into landscapes deemed underproductive, examining similarities and divergences with the American West and the Russian steppe. Using court and land registers, I uncover the stories of specific tent-dwelling individuals and communities involved in struggles over property, commerce, and the forms of modern governance. My other ongoing project combines my interests in the histories of Islamic law and capitalism. It explores the twentieth-century legacies of late Ottoman economy-making efforts in the Eastern Mediterranean, Iraq and the Persian Gulf, particularly the codification of civil law. My research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Center for American and Overseas Research Centers.
Before coming to Stanford, I completed my PhD at the University of California, Berkeley and taught in the Persian Gulf for five years, first at Qatar University and then at New York University Abu Dhabi. At NYU Abu Dhabi, I co-founded OpenGulf, a set of interconnected digital projects focusing on historical documentation about the Gulf region. -
Farah Bazzi
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2018
BioFarah Bazzi was born in Lebanon and raised in The Netherlands. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in early modern global history at Stanford University. Farah’s work attempts to bridge both Mediterranean and Atlantic history by focusing on how objects, people, and imaginations moved between the Ottoman world, Morocco, Iberia, and the Americas during the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Furthermore, Farah’s research interests include environmental thought, race, indigeneity, cosmology, cartography, and technologies of conquest. In her dissertation, Farah looks at the expulsion of the moriscos and their presence in the Americas, Morocco, and the Ottoman Empire from a socio-environmental perspective. In addition to this, Farah is interested the construction of Al-Andalus as an aesthetically appealing, pursuable, and transplantable natural and racialized landscape in Spanish, Arabic, and Ottoman sources.
Currently, Farah is one of the project founders and managers of the ‘Life in Quarantine: Witnessing Global Pandemic’ project sponsored by CESTA, the History Department, and the Division of Languages and Cultures. She is also the graduate coordinator for the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (CMEMS) at Stanford and the Graduate Student Counselor (director) on the board of the Renaissance Society of America (RSA). -
Jennifer Burns
Associate Professor of History
BioI am a historian of the twentieth century United States working at the intersection of intellectual, political, and cultural history, with a particular interest in ideas about the state, markets, and capitalism and how these play out in policy and politics.
My first book, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford, 2009), was an intellectual biography of the libertarian novelist Ayn Rand. For more on this book, watch my interviews with Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert, or check out my website (www.jenniferburns.org). I am currently writing a book about the economist Milton Friedman.
At Stanford, I’ve been involved in a number of new initiatives, including serving as a faculty advisor to the Approaches to Capitalism Workshop at the Stanford Humanities Center, co-founding the Bay Area Consortium for the History of Ideas in America (BACHIA), and convening the Hoover Institution Library and Archives Workshop on Political Economy.
I teach courses on modern U.S. history, religious history, and the intellectual history of capitalism.
My writing on the history of conservatism, libertarianism, and liberalism has appeared in a number of academic and popular journals, including Reviews in American History, Modern Intellectual History, Journal of Cultural Economy, The New York Times, The New Republic, and Dissent.
Prospective graduate students: please consult my history department webpage for more information on graduate study. https://history.stanford.edu/people/jennifer-burns -
Alina Bykova
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2020
Research Assistant, FSI - CISAC
Other Tech - Graduate, History DepartmentBioAlina is a PhD candidate in Russian and East European History. Her research interests include Arctic and Soviet environmental history with a focus on energy and industry. Alina is writing her dissertation on the history of energy and extraction on Svalbard, Norway. She also works as a research associate and editor-in-chief at The Arctic Institute, an interdisciplinary think tank.
Alina earned her masters in European and Russian Affairs from the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto in 2019. Her masters thesis was about the rise and fall of Soviet mining settlements on Svalbard. Prior to her work in academia, she completed a Bachelor of Journalism at Ryerson University and worked as a breaking news reporter at the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest newspaper. -
Joel Cabrita
Associate Professor of History and, by courtesy, of Religious Studies
BioJoel Cabrita is a historian of modern Southern Africa who focuses on Eswatini (formerly Swaziland) and South Africa. She examines the transnational networks of the Southern African region including those which connect Southern Africans to the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans. Her most recent book (The People’s Zion: Southern Africa, the United States and a Transatlantic Faith-Healing Movement, Harvard University Press, 2018) investigates the convergence of evangelical piety, transnational networks and the rise of industrialized societies in both Southern Africa and North America. The People's Zion was awarded the American Society of Church History's Albert C Outler Prize for 2019 https://churchhistory.org/grants-and-awards/ She is also the co-editor of a volume examining the global dimensions of Christian practice, advocating for a shift away from Western Christianity to the lateral connections connecting southern hemisphere religious practitioners (Relocating World Christianity, Brill, 2017).
Cabrita has a long-standing interest in how Southern Africans used and transformed a range of old and new media forms. Her first book (Text and Authority in the South African Nazaretha Church, Cambridge University Press, 2014) investigates the print culture of a large South African religious organization, while her edited collection (Religion, Media and Marginality in Africa, Ohio University Press, 2018) focuses on the intersection of media, Islam, Christianity and political expression in modern Africa.
Her current project (under contract with Ohio University Press) is the biography of a pioneering African feminist, Christian Pentecostal pioneer and liberation leader, Regina Gelana Twala (1908 – 1968), who co-founded Swaziland’s first political party in 1960 and introduced the Assemblies of God denomination to the region. Celebrated during her lifetime, Twala’s remarkable story is today largely forgotten, in part a consequence of her untimely death in 1968, one month before Swaziland’s independence. Cabrita’s project considers the radically new perspective a figure such as Twala affords on the contribution of women to Africa’s anti-colonial liberation movements and to evangelical history. The book will probe the politics of memory whereby certain African nationalist and religious icons have been erased from the historical record.
Cabrita did her PhD at the University of Cambridge and was subsequently a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. Before moving to Stanford, she held permanent posts at SOAS (University of London) and the University of Cambridge. Her research has been recognized by two major early-career research prizes, the British Arts and Humanities Early Career Research Fellowship (2015) and the Philip Leverhulme Prize (2017). -
Albert Camarillo
Leon Sloss Jr. Memorial Professor, Emeritus
BioA member of the Stanford University History Department since 1975, Camarillo is widely regarded as one of the founding scholars of the field of Mexican American history and Chicano Studies. He was born and raised in the South Central Los Angeles community of Compton where he attended the Compton public schools before entering the University of California at Los Angeles as a freshman in 1966. He continued his education at UCLA in the Ph.D. program in U.S. History where he received his doctorate in 1975 and where his dissertation was nominated that year as one of the best Ph.D. theses in the nation in American history. Camarillo has published seven books and dozens of articles and essays dealing with the experiences of Mexican Americans and other racial and immigrant groups in American cities.
Camarillo’s newest book, America's Racial Borderhoods: Mexican Americans and the Changing Ethnic/Racial Landscapes of Cities, 1850-2000 will be published in spring 2016 by Oxford University Press. Two of his books, Chicanos in a Changing Society: From Mexican Pueblos to American Barrios (Harvard University Press, 1979, six printings; Southern Methodist University Press edition, March 2005) and Chicanos in California: A History of Mexican Americans (Boyd and Fraser, 1984, four printings) have been widely read. He is currently working on a book entitled Going Back to Compton: Reflections of a Native Son on Life in an Infamous American City, an autobiographical and historical account of Compton from the 1950s to 2010.
Over the course of his career, Camarillo has received many awards and fellowships. He is the only faculty member in the history of Stanford University to receive six of the highest and most prestigious awards for excellence in teaching, service to undergraduate education, and contributions to the University and its alumni association. At Stanford’s Commencement in 1988 and in 1994 respectively, he received the Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel Award for Outstanding Service to Undergraduate Education and the Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching. In 1997, he was awarded the Bing Teaching Fellowship Award for Excellence and Innovation in Undergraduate Teaching. Camarillo was awarded the Miriam Roland Prize for Volunteer Service for 2005, an award that recognizes a Stanford Faculty member who “over and above their normal academic duties engage and involve students in integrating academic scholarship with significant volunteer service to society.” Most recently, he received the Richard W. Lyman Award from the Stanford Alumni Association in 2010 and the President’s Award for Excellence Through Diversity in 2011. Camarillo has also received various awards for research and writing including a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship; he was also a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and at the Stanford Humanities Center.
Camarillo served as President of the Organization of American Historians for 2012-13, the nation’s largest membership association for historians of the U.S. He is also the past president to the American Historical Association-Pacific Coast Branch. -
Marina Del Cassio
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2022
BioMarina Del Cassio is a history Ph.D. student focused on wildfire and water in California. She is particularly interested in learning from Native land stewardship practices, and in probing the nineteenth-century origins of California’s water rights, land use, and wildfire liability regimes. Her work aims to support pathways to sustainability and environmental justice. Before coming to Stanford, Marina practiced environmental law in San Francisco and clerked on the Ninth Circuit and the California Supreme Court. She holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School.
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Luther Cox Cenci
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2018
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMy dissertation examines the unexpected itineraries, mutations, and afterlives of late imperial Chinese legal culture across the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia during the long 19th century. Empirically, my study uses archives in classical and vernacular Chinese, Dutch, and English and situated in Hong Kong, Singapore, Jakarta, London, and the Hague. Viewed together, they reveal how the communal identities and institutions of Chinese migrants and their descendants were shaped by world-historical forces: the rise of global capitalism and European colonialism, the contest between liberal and pluralist models of law and sovereignty, and the transformation and eventual collapse of the late Qing state.
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Giovanna Ceserani
Associate Professor of Classics and, by courtesy, of History
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsIntellectual history, data science in the humanities, ancient and modern historiography, history of archaeology, early modern travels and explorations of the past
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Gordon H. Chang
Olive H. Palmer Professor in Humanities
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI co-direct an international project that seeks to recover the history of Chinese railroad workers in North America.
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Amanda Coate
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2019
BioAmanda Coate is a PhD candidate in History at Stanford University, where she studies early modern Europe. Her research focuses primarily on the cultural and intellectual histories of 16th- and 17th-century Britain, Germany, and France. In her work, she has investigated ideas about cannibalism (particularly survival cannibalism), science and medicine in Britain and Ireland, and human-animal interactions. Her ongoing dissertation research examines early modern European understandings of hunger and food scarcity. She is a writer for Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal.
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David Como
Professor of History
BioMy teaching and research focus on the following areas of interest:
Puritanism, Politics
English Revolution
History of print
History of Political Thought
History of Religion and the Reformation
Global History -
Jon Cooper
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2018
BioJon Cooper is a PhD student in History at Stanford University. He is broadly focused on British and European intellectual history, but his research is on the history of political economy in early modern Britain and its empire.
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Robert Crews
Professor of History
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsAfghanistan: A Very Short Introduction (book manuscript co-authored with Wazhmah Osman, under contract with Oxford University Press).
Muslims from the Margins: The Politics of Islam in a Global Age (book manuscript – a history of the politics of Muslim minority communities in Mexico, Ghana, India, Russia, and Northern Ireland)
The Afghan Shia: A Revolutionary Minority (book manuscript) -
J. P. Daughton
Professor of History and, by courtesy, of French and Italian
BioJ. P. Daughton is Professor of History, and Professor (by courtesy) of French and Italian. He is a historian of Europe, imperialism and colonialism, and global history. His teaching and publications explore political, cultural, social, and environmental history, as well as the modern history of religion, technology, and humanitarianism. His affiliations at Stanford include the Europe Center, the Center for African Studies, and the Center for Human Rights and International Justice.
His most recent book, In the Forest of No Joy: The Congo-Océan Railroad and the Tragedy of French Colonialism (W. W. Norton, 2021), tells the story of one of the deadliest construction projects in history. Between 1921 and 1934, French colonial interests recruited -- most often by force -- more than 100,000 men, women, and children to work on a 500-kilometer stretch of rail between Brazzaville and the Atlantic Coast. In the end, tens of thousands of Africans were dead, killed by mistreatment, starvation, and disease. The book painstakingly recounts the experiences of local communities in the face of colonial economic development, considers why the railroad witnessed such extraordinary violence and suffering, and explores how the rhetoric of "civilization" and "development" were used to justify the loss of so many African lives. In the Forest of No Joy was shortlisted for the Cundill History Prize and a finalist for the American Library in Paris Book Prize. A French translation is forthcoming with Éditions du Seuil.
Daughton is also the author of An Empire Divided: Religion, Republicanism, and the Making of French Colonialism, 1880-1914 (Oxford University Press, 2006), a book that tells the story of how troubled relations between Catholic missionaries and a host of republican critics shaped colonial policies, Catholic perspectives, and domestic French politics in the decades before the First World War. Based on archival research from four continents, the book challenges the long-held view that French colonizing and “civilizing” goals were the product of a distinctly secular republican ideology built on Enlightenment ideals. A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, An Empire Divided was awarded the George Louis Beer Prize for the best book in international history from the American Historical Association, as well as the Alf Andrew Heggoy Book Prize from the French Colonial Historical Society.
He is also the editor, with Owen White, of In God’s Empire: French Missionaries in the Modern World (Oxford University Press, 2012), a collection of essays on the role played by French religious workers in the empire and beyond. His essays and reviews, on themes related to colonial violence, international governance, informal empire, and cultural policy, have appeared in publications like the Journal of Modern History, the American Historical Review, and French Historical Studies.
Daughton’s PhD advisees have written on a wide range of subjects, from nineteenth-century French cultural policies to the history of famine, and from alcohol consumption and violence in the First World War to the work of international NGOs in Algeria during decolonization. He is currently accepting graduate students interested in transnational history, modern Europe, empire, humanitarianism, international politics, and environment history. -
Rowan Dorin
Associate Professor of History
BioI am a historian of western Europe and the Mediterranean, primarily during the high and late Middle Ages. Much of my research tries to understand how law and society interact with each other, especially where legal norms conflict with social practices. Another strand of my research explores the history of economic life and economic thought, especially medieval debates over usury and moneylending. I have also written on the circulation of goods, people, and ideas in the medieval Mediterranean.
My first book (No Return: Jews, Christian Usurers, and the Spread of Mass Expulsion in Medieval Europe, Princeton University Press) uses the banishment of Jewish and Christian moneylenders to explore the rise of mass expulsion as a widespread practice in the later Middle Ages. A second ongoing project examines the ways in which medieval canon law was adapted, reinterpreted, or resisted in local contexts in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The latter builds on Corpus Synodalium, a prize-winning full-text database of late medieval local ecclesiastical legislation that I have been developing since 2016, with assistance from colleagues around the world.
Born and raised in western Canada, I did my undergraduate and doctoral work at Harvard University, earning an MPhil in Medieval History from the University of Cambridge along the way. Before coming to Stanford, I was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. -
Kai Dowding
Undergraduate Student Services Officer, History Department
BioAs the undergraduate student services officer for the Department of History, I oversee student degree progress in the major and minor and work closely with the director of undergraduate studies, director of honors and research, and our intrepid peer advisors to plan and carry out undergraduate programming. I also schedule the department’s curriculum in collaboration with the vice chair. I enjoy getting to know each student as they journey through the major or minor, and am always happy to chat with students about their interests and plans, both within Stanford and beyond.
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Dan Edelstein
William H. Bonsall Professor of French and Professor, by courtesy, of History and of Political Science
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMy current research lies in the fields of intellectual history, political thought, and digital humanities (DH). I recently published a book that explores the history of rights from the Wars of Religion to the Age of Revolutions; I'm currently working on a book that explores the intellectual history of revolution; I have a number of papers on Rousseau's political thought underway; and I continue to work on a number of DH projects.
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Paula Findlen
Ubaldo Pierotti Professor of Italian History and Professor, by courtesy, of French and Italian
BioI have taught the early history of science and medicine for many years on the premise that one of the most important ways to understand how science, medicine and technology have become so central to contemporary society comes from examining the process by which scientific knowledge emerged. I also take enormous pleasure in examining a kind of scientific knowledge that did not have an autonomous existence from other kinds of creative endeavors, but emerged in the context of humanistic approaches to the world (in defiance of C.P. Snow's claim that the modern world is one of "two cultures" that share very little in common). More generally, I am profoundly attracted to individuals in the past who aspired to know everything. It still seems like a worthy goal.
My other principal interest lies in understanding the world of the Renaissance, with a particular focus on Italy. I continue to be fascinated by a society that made politics, economics and culture so important to its self-definition, and that obviously succeeded in all these endeavors for some time, as the legacy of such figures as Machiavelli and Leonardo suggests. Renaissance Italy, in short, is a historical laboratory for understanding the possibilities and the problems of an innovative society. As such, it provides an interesting point of comparison to Gilded Age America, where magnates such as J.P. Morgan often described themselves as the "new Medici," and to other historical moments when politics, art and society combined fruitfully.
Finally, I have a certain interest in the relations between gender, culture and knowledge. Virginia Woolf rightfully observed at the beginning of the twentieth century that one could go to a library and find a great deal about women but very little that celebrated or supported their accomplishments. This is no longer true a century later, in large part thanks to the efforts of many scholars, male and female, who have made the work of historical women available to modern readers and who have begun to look at relations between the sexes in more sophisticated ways. Our own debates and disagreements on such issues make this subject all the more important to understand. -
Estelle Freedman
Edgar E. Robinson Professor of United States History, Emerita
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI continue to work on the history sexual violence, including the use of oral history testimony. I am currently co-producing an historical documentary film "Singing for Justice: Faith Petric and the Folk Process."
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Trevor Getz
Visiting Professor
BioTrevor Getz is an interpreter of the past. His work focuses on history education – especially in the field of world history – as well as the social history of Africa. He is the author or co-author of eleven volumes, including Abina and the Important Men, which won the 2014 James Harvey Robinson Prize. His work has been published by Duke UP, Oxford UP, Ohio UP, Bloomsbury, Prentice Hall, Westview, and James Currey. It has also appeared in The American Historical Review, The Journal of West African History, Slavery and Abolition, African Economic History, and Ghana Studies. Trevor has also written produced a number of documentaries and historical films which have garnered festival prizes. He is the recipient of the American Historical Association’s 2020 Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching Award. Aside from written text, his other historical work resides in the realms of comics and Lego.
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Jonathan Gienapp
Associate Professor of History
BioJonathan Gienapp is an associate professor in the History department. He received his B.A. from Harvard University and his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. Principally a scholar of Revolutionary and early republican America, he is particularly interested in the period’s constitutionalism, political culture, and intellectual history. More generally, he is interested in the method and practice of the history of ideas.
His first book, *The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era* (Harvard University Press, 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. More specifically, it investigates how early political debates over the Constitution’s meaning, in transforming the practices through which one could justifiably interpret the document, helped in the process alter how Americans imagined the Constitution and its possibilities. In the process, it considers 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 Spectator USA Book of the Year for 2018. It has been reviewed in The Nation, was the subject of a symposium at Balkinization, and was chosen for the 2019 Publius Symposium co-hosted by the Stanford Constitutional Law Center and the Stanford Center for Law and History. He wrote about some of the book's central themes in an op-ed for the Boston Globe, and has discussed the book on "New Books in History" and "The Age of Jackson Podcast" as well as in interviews for The Way of Improvement Leads Home and the Harvard University Press Blog.
Gienapp has also written on a range of related topics pertaining to early American constitutionalism, politics, and intellectual history, originalism and modern constitutional theory, and the study of the history of ideas. He has published articles and book chapters in a host of venues, including the Journal of the Early Republic, Law and History Review, The New England Quarterly, and Constitutional Commentary.
He has written extensively on the relationship between history and constitutional originalism and is completing a book on that subject, entitled "Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique," which is under contract with Yale University Press and to be published in early 2024.
He is also at work on a large book 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.
He has lectured widely on the U.S. Constitution and the American Founding era. Among other appearances, he discussed the Constitution's history in an episode of the podcast, "Writ Large," participated in a National Constitution Center Town Hall, "The Founders' Library: Intellectual Sources of the Constitution," was interviewed about the history of election disputes in the United States for The New York Times, and discussed the history of minority rule in the United States on NPR's All Things Considered. He also helped compile the National Constitution Center's Founders' Library. -
Fiona Griffiths
Professor of History and, by courtesy, of Religious Studies and of German Studies
BioFiona Griffiths is a historian of medieval Western Europe, focusing on intellectual and religious life from the ninth to the thirteenth century. Her work explores the possibilities for social experimentation and cultural production inherent in medieval religious reform movements, addressing questions of gender, spirituality, and authority, particularly as they pertain to the experiences and interactions of religious men (priests or monks) with women (nuns and clerical wives). Griffiths is the author of Nuns' Priests' Tales: Men and Salvation in Medieval Women's Monastic Life,The Middle Ages Series (The University of Pennsylvania Press: 2018) and The Garden of Delights: Reform and Renaissance for Women in the Twelfth Century, The Middle Ages Series (The University of Pennsylvania Press: 2007); she is co-editor (with Kathryn Starkey) of Sensory Reflections: Traces of Experience in Medieval Artifacts (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019) and (with Julie Hotchin) of Partners in Spirit: Men, Women, and Religious Life in Germany, 1100-1500 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014). Her essays have appeared in Speculum, Early Medieval Europe, Church History, the Journal of Medieval History, postmedieval, and Viator. She has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities; the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation; the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study; the Stanford Humanities Center; and the Institute of Historical Research (University of London). Griffiths is a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America.
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Stephen Haber
A.A. and Jeanne Welch Milligan Professor, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, Professor of History and, by courtesy, of Economics
BioStephen Haber is the A.A. and Jeanne Welch Milligan Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University, the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. In addition, he is a professor of political science, professor of history, and professor of economics (by courtesy).
Haber has spent his career investigating why the world distribution of income so uneven. His papers have been published in economics, history, political science, and law journals.
He is the author of five books and the editor of six more. Haber’s most recent books include Fragile by Design with Charles Calomiris (Princeton University Press), which examines how governments and industry incumbents often craft banking regulatory policies in ways that stifle competition and increase systemic risk. The Battle Over Patents (Oxford University Press), a volume edited with Naomi Lamoreaux, documents the development of US-style patent systems and the political fights that have shaped them.
His latest project focuses on a long-standing puzzle in the social sciences: why are prosperous democracies not randomly distributed across the planet, but rather, are geographically clustered? Haber and his coauthors answer this question by using geospatial tools to simulate the ecological conditions that shaped pre-industrial food production and trade. They then employ machine learning methods to elucidate the relationship between ecological conditions and the levels of economic development that emerged across the globe over the past three centuries.
Haber holds a Ph.D. in history from UCLA and has been on the Stanford faculty since 1987.
From 1995 to 1998, he served as associate dean for the social sciences and director of Graduate Studies of Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences. He is among Stanford’s most distinguished teachers, having been awarded every teaching prize Stanford has to offer. -
Gabrielle Hecht
Stanton Foundation Professor of Nuclear Security and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
BioGabrielle Hecht is Professor of History, Professor (by courtesy) of Anthropology, and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute. She is President of the Society for the History of Technology.
Hecht's current research explores the inside-out Earth and its wastes in order to reveal the hidden costs of the so-called "energy transition," with research sites in the Arctic, the Andes, southern Africa, and west Africa. This project builds on her new book, Residual Governance: How South African Foretells Planetary Futures (Duke Univ. Press, forthcoming November 2023).
Hecht's graduate courses include colloquia on "Power in the Anthropocene," "Infrastructure and Power in the Global South," "Technopolitics," and "Materiality and Power." She teaches a community-engaged undergraduate research seminar on "Racial Justice in the Nuclear Age," in partnership with the Bayview Hunters Point Community Advocates (BVHPCA). She is currently working with BVHPCA and other partners to develop knowledge infrastructures to underpin community-driven public history that supports racial equity and environmental justice.
Hecht’s 2012 book Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade offers new perspectives on the global nuclear order by focusing on African uranium mines and miners. It received awards from the Society for the Social Studies of Science, the American Historical Association, the American Sociological Association, and the Suzanne M. Glasscock Humanities Institute, as well as an honorable mention from the African Studies Association. An abridged version appeared in French as Uranium Africain, une histoire globale (Le Seuil 2016), and a Japanese translation is due out in 2021. Her first book, The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity (1998/ 2nd ed 2009), explores how the French embedded nuclear policy in reactor technology, and nuclear culture in reactor operations. It received awards from the American Historical Association and the Society for the History of Technology, and has appeared in French as Le rayonnement de la France: Énergie nucléaire et identité nationale après la seconde guerre mondiale (2004/ 2014).
Her affiliations at Stanford include the Center for African Studies, the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, the Center for Global Ethnography, the Program on Urban Studies, and the Program in Modern Thought and Literature. Before rejoining Stanford in 2017, Hecht taught at the University of Michigan’s History department for 18 years. She helped to found and direct UM’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society (STS). She served as associate director of UM’s African Studies Center, and participated in its long-term collaboration with the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (South Africa). She has supervised dissertations in STS, African history and anthropology, nuclear studies, and French history.
Hecht holds a PhD in History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania (1992), and a bachelor’s degree in Physics from MIT (1986). She’s been a visiting scholar in universities in Australia, France, the Netherlands, Norway, South Africa, and Sweden. Her work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council for Learned Societies, and the South African and Dutch national research foundations, among others. She serves on numerous advisory boards, including for the Andra, France’s national radioactive waste management agency. -
Allyson Hobbs
Associate Professor of History
BioAllyson Hobbs is an Assistant Professor in the History Department at Stanford University. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University and she received a Ph.D. with distinction from the University of Chicago. She has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research, and the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity at Stanford. Allyson teaches courses on American identity, African American history, African American women’s history, and twentieth century American history. She has won numerous teaching awards including the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize, the Graves Award in the Humanities, and the St. Clair Drake Teaching Award. She gave a TEDx talk at Stanford, she has appeared on C-Span, MSNBC, National Public Radio, and her work has been featured on cnn.com, slate.com, and in the Los Angeles Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Christian Science Monitor, and the New York Times.
Allyson’s first book, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, published by Harvard University Press in October 2014, examines the phenomenon of racial passing in the United States from the late eighteenth century to the present. A Chosen Exile won two prizes from the Organization of American Historians: the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize for best first book in American history and the Lawrence Levine Prize for best book in American cultural history. A Chosen Exile has been featured on All Things Considered on National Public Radio, Book TV on C-SPAN, The Melissa Harris-Perry Show on MSNBC, the Tavis Smiley Show on Public Radio International, the Madison Show on SiriusXM, and TV News One with Roland Martin. A Chosen Exile has been reviewed in the New York Times Book Review, the San Francisco Chronicle, Harper’s, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Boston Globe. The book was selected as a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, a “Best Book of 2014” by the San Francisco Chronicle, and a “Book of the Week” by the Times Higher Education in London. The Root named A Chosen Exile as one of the “Best 15 Nonfiction Books by Black Authors in 2014.” -
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 a School of Humanities and Sciences lecturer in the COLLEGE program and Department of History.
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Burçak Keskin Kozat
Director of Finance & Operations, History Department
Current Role at StanfordDirector of Finance & Operations
