Serena Shah

Bio

I 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.

Education & Certifications

• A.B., Harvard University, Classics and African & African American Studies, Summa Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa (2021)