PhD 2023 (History) Brandeis University  

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Nineteenth and twentieth century United States; legal history; history of capitalism; business history; political thought; critical legal studies; law and political economy

BIOGRAPHY

Jared Berkowitz is a historian of law and capitalism. His research focuses on nineteenth century American legal history with a particular interest in how the corporation has changed over time in American law and political economy. Jared received his BA in History from Rutgers College, JD from Rutgers School of Law, MA from Rutgers University and PhD from Brandeis University. In 2023, he joined the University of Chicago as an Assistant Instructional Professor of Law, Letters, and Society. Jared has taught courses in American Legal History, Law and Political Economy, and Legal Reasoning. Currently, he is working on a book manuscript, provisionally titled Creature of Capitalism: A Legal History of Corporate Personhood in Nineteenth Century America. The project tells the story of how the law of corporate personhood transformed from an instrument of regulation to a source of corporate power. Jared’s work has received support from the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, the American Society for Legal History, and the Business History Conference. His writing has appeared in the Virginia Law & Business Review as well as HistPhil.org. 

RESEARCH INTERESTS

The history of political thought, intellectual history, the age of revolutions, American history, French history, legal and constitutional history. 

BIOGRAPHY

Angus Harwood Brown is a historian of political thought, with a particular interest in the history of democracy and democratic revolutions in the (very) long eighteenth century. He is currently working on a book on constitutional guardianship in the American and French Revolutions, and on a new research project on debates about perpetual peace and world government since the eighteenth century.  

Prior to coming to the University of Chicago Angus completed a PhD in History at the University of Cambridge, focused on the history of political thought. His work has recently been published in the Journal of the History of Ideas, the American Journal of Legal History, and the Intellectual History Review, and he was the recipient of the International Society for Intellectual History’s 2024 Charles Schmitt Prize.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

"Sieyès’s Constitutional Jury, the Pennsylvania Council of Censors, and the Debate on the Conservative Power in the French Revolution," Journal of the HIstory of Ideas 85, no. 3 (2024): 479-508. 
 

"The Pennsylvania Council of Censors and the Debate on the Guardian of the Constitution in the Early United States," American Journal of Legal History 64, no. 1 (2024): 1-26.
 

"Republican nostalgia, the division of labour, and the origins of inequality in the thought of the Abbé Sieyès," Intellectual History Review 34, no. 2 (2024): 433-456. 
 

RECENT AWARDS

2024 Charles Schmitt Prize from the International Society for Intellectual History for his paper “Republican Hegemony as Perpetual Peace? Sieyès’ Theory of International Politics and the Intellectual Origins of Kant’s ‘Federation of Peoples’.”
 

BIOGRAPHY

John McCallum is an Assistant Instructional Professor in the Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and an undergraduate degree from Northwestern University.

John’s research interests cluster around questions of moral and ethical judgment in American history. His current book project “Democratic Violence and the Transformation of Moral Sentiments in the ‘Good War,’” examines the popular embrace of a vernacular “realism” in the World War II years that could encompass stunning new forms of international violence alongside a growing commitment to democracy, human rights, racial liberalism, and the end of empire. The book rejects a durable tradition—in both critical and popular writing—that treats the politics of war as basically undemocratic, and the American public as essentially cloistered from the realities of total war by distance, censorship, and elite manipulation. To the contrary, World War II Americans encountered the horrors of modern conflict in strikingly intimate detail. The pro-war consensus of the 1940s was anything but superficial, and a fuller picture of this period is necessary to make sense of the Cold War democracy of the ensuing decades.

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COURSES

At the University of Chicago, John’s teaching has included the following courses:

• War, Law, Norms: Violence and its Limits
• Writing History: Methods of Narrative Analysis and Persuasion
• Historical Methods
• History and Social Scientific Explanation
• Crises in American Democracy
• Watergate and American Democracy
• Human Rights II: History and Human Rights
• Turning Right? Conservative Politics in a Long Twentieth Century
• America in World Civilization, colonial period and twentieth century

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

“U.S. Censorship, Violence, and Moral Judgement in a Wartime Democracy, 1941–1945,” Diplomatic History, Volume 41, Issue 3, June 2017, Pages 543–566.

“War and the Historical Sociology of Human Rights: Violent Entanglements,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 8, no. 3 (2017): 559-578.

“World War II—A Historiographical Survey,” in The Routledge History of the Twentieth Century United States (2018).

“The Book of the Dead,” The New Rambler Review (2020). 

PhD'21 (US History), University of Chicago

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States; history of the American South; cultural, social, and political history; race and racism; gender and sexuality; violence; science, medicine, and the body; mass and visual culture; collective memory; public history

DISSERTATION

Southern Sublime: Legacies of Civil War Violence in the New South

BIOGRAPHY

Alex is a cultural historian of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century American South. He is interested in how the presumed oddities of Southern life make legible currents of the U.S. experience that ran subterranean through other regions. In this light, the regional provides a framework to realize a fuller understanding of U.S. history, its myths, and its contradictions.

He is working on his manuscript titled Shattered: The South after the Civil War, which examines how the war’s destruction forced white Southerners to create new ways of making meaning from the material world through everyday spectacles that both processed and restaged its violence long after Confederate surrender.

More broadly, Alex’s diverse research interests cohere around an interdisciplinary approach that reframes historical oddities as meaningful evidence of how Americans made meaning of the political, economic, and social worlds they inhabited through their lived experience.

Alex earned his PhD from the University of Chicago in 2021, and his work has appeared in Southern Cultures.

PUBLICATIONS

“The Kinetic South.” Southern Cultures 27, no. 2 (2021): 62-83.

[Book Review] Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums by Samuel J. Redman. American Nineteenth Century History 18, no. 2 (2017): 196–98.

RESEARCH INTERESTS

My primary research projects have focused on the intersections of women, labor, and capitalism in South Korea and a comparative analysis of Cold War-era popular culture, gender, and society in East Asian countries. Currently, I am writing a book manuscript, entitled "Reimagining Cold War Domesticity: South Korean (De)Housewifization, Family Economy, and Consumer Capitalism," about the economic and cultural history of postwar South Korean domesticity, which considers how the transnational gendering processes of domesticity shaped to naturalize and produce derivatives in relation to class stratification, state, culture, and economy. I want my research to reframe Cold War-era historical narratives by focusing on women's labor and the family unit, demystifying the hegemonic place the U.S. occupies within Korean and East Asian history during the Cold War. The second book project will expand my research interests in gender history into transnational, cultural, and economic dimensions and investigate women's work in the private education industry in Korean diaspora communities in the U.S. and other Asian countries.

BIOGRAPHY

Since earning my Ph.D. in modern Korean history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I have taught various courses related to Korea and Asia, addressing history, gender, culture, society, and politics at CSU-Chico, Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania, Seoul National University, and Soongsil University. Before joining the University of Chicago, I finished a postdoctoral fellowship at the Zvi Yavetz School of Historical Studies at Tel Aviv University. I worked as an HK research professor at the Institute for the Study of Korean Modernity at Yonsei University in South Korea.

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Slavery and emancipation; the early modern and modern Caribbean; the Atlantic World and early Americas; France and Francophone colonies; histories of gender and sexuality; and histories of race and racial politics.

PUBLICATIONS

“‘They Are Free with Me:’ Enslaved and Freed Women’s Anti-Slavery Lawsuits in the French Antilles, 1830-1848.” Forthcoming in French Historical Studies, 2024.

RECENT AWARDS

2024: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture Short-Term Research Fellowship
2023: John Carter Brown Library Short-Term Research Fellowship
2022-2023: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture NEH-Postdoctoral Research Fellowship

BIOGRAPHY

Deirdre Lyons is an Earl S. Johnson Instructor of History in the MAPSS program. She received her PhD from the University of Chicago, an MA in History and an MA in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago, and a BA in History from New York University. She has held postdoctoral and research fellowships from, among other institutions, the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, the John Carter Brown Library, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the University of Chicago, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, and a Fulbright U.S. Student fellowship.

Dr. Lyons’s research focuses on the history of gender, family, and racial politics before and after the second abolition of slavery in the French Antilles in 1848. Her book manuscript-in-progress, entitled Slavery, Emancipation, and Family Politics in the Nineteenth-Century French Antilles, draws on over two years’ of archival research in France, Martinique, and Guadeloupe to examine the intimate, gendered lives of enslaved and freed peoples who helped to shape the contours of slavery and emancipation, while shedding new light on how French reformers, colonial authorities, and planters tried to remake a post-slavery society by disciplining and reforming the family lives of the laboring populations. At its core, Dr. Lyons’s project illuminates how the family became a site of contestation over freedom’s limits before and after slavery in Martinique and Guadeloupe. Her work also reveals how enslaved and freed people—especially women—created cultural and social familial institutions in bondage and in freedom that served as survival strategies, a means of establishing autonomy, and as spaces from which they could counteract exploitation.

In addition to her research, Dr. Lyons has extensive experience in academic service and projects beyond academia. She has served as the Assistant Reviews Editor for the Journal of African History and is the current Tech Officer for the French Colonial Historical Society. She also has engaged in several public-facing history projects, including co-curating a special exhibition at the Haitian American Museum of Chicago and consulting on policy research for anti-human trafficking NGO’s.