Yale University, PhD '79

BIOGRAPHY

Christine Stansell writes about the social, sexual, and cultural history of American women and gender relations. Her most recent book, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (Henry Holt, 2000), follows an influential group of writers, artists, and political radicals from 1890 to 1920. Stansell’s first book, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (Knopf, 1986), reveals the central role that working-class women played in the city’s history. She worked in the new field of the history of sexuality, collaborating with Ann Snitow and Sharon Thompson to publish Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality (Monthly Review Press, 1983).

She has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Institute for Advanced Study, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

University of Pennsylvania, PhD '15

Office Hours
Spring Quarter 2025
https://calendly.com/matthewkruer/15min

BIOGRAPHY

Matthew Kruer is a scholar of early modern North America exploring the relationship between Indigenous power and the development of the British empire. He holds a master’s degree in history from the University of Oregon and a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania.

Kruer’s first book, Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America, examines the tumultuous decade between 1675 and 1685, during which ethnic riots and separatist movements swept through New York, Maryland colonists launched two uprisings, Virginia colonists rebelled against their government, and North Carolina colonists engaged in full-blown revolution. These colonial insurrections were closely connected with a spasm of wars among Indigenous nations ranging from the Great Lakes and the Deep South. Framing this chaotic violence as a single event, which he calls the Time of Anarchy, he shows that these seemingly distinct conflicts were connected by the Susquehannocks, a once-powerful Indigenous nation in what is currently Pennsylvania. Expelled from their homes by colonial militia and scattered across eastern North America, Susquehannocks exerted a political influence wildly disproportionate to their numbers, in the process reshaping both Native nations and English colonies. This book explores the forms of power exercised by seemingly weak and vulnerable Indigenous migrants, who in their struggles for survival and resurgence drove political struggle and social change in early America.

His next project explores discourses of sovereignty among Indigenous nations within the early modern British empire and the evolution of British settler colonialism in North America and the Caribbean.

Kruer serves as the University of Chicago’s liaison to the Newberry Consortium in American Indian and Indigenous Studies (NCAIS), which links universities across the United States and Canada engaged in Indigenous Studies. Each year NCAIS holds a Graduate Student Conference, runs a 3-day Spring Workshop and 4-week Summer Institute in research methods, and offers fellowships for faculty and graduate students. Please contact Prof. Kruer for additional information about these opportunities and about Indigenous Studies at the University of Chicago.

Harvard University, PhD '65

BIOGRAPHY

A cultural historian, Neil Harris has written about American art, artists, and art collecting; the history of technology, architecture, and design; American entertainment; world's fairs; and the development of American museums, libraries, and learned societies. In addition to more than one hundred papers and reviews that have appeared in print since 1962, recent and forthcoming published essays treat American art collectors and patterns of British deaccessioning; period rooms and American art museums; American world’s fairs and the taste for Japonisme; and the growth of interest, in Chicago and elsewhere, in Art Deco.

Harris served as chair of the History Department from 1985–88 and 2000–01. He served as chairman of the American Council of Learned Societies and of the Smithsonian Council, as a senator for Phi Beta Kappa. Harris has sat on the editorial boards of the New England Quarterly, the Winterthur Portfolio, the American Quarterly, the Frederick Law Olmsted Papers, and several other periodicals and projects.

Honors

• 1978–86 Pesidential Appointee, National Museum Services Board

• 1985 Visiting Directeur d'Etudes, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales

• 1986 Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Lecturer

• 1990 Joseph Henry Medal, Smithsonian Institution

• 1990–91 Getty Scholar

• 1993 Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences

• 1995–96 Distinguished Scholar, National Museum of American Art

• 1999–2000 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and a Getty Visiting Scholarship

• 2008 Lawrence A. Fleischman Award, Archives of American Art

• 2010 Iris Foundation Award and a Mellon Emeritus Fellowship

• 2022 Harvard University Centennial Medal

Board Service

• Art Institute of Chicago (Architecture and Design Committee)

• J. Paul Getty Museum

• National Museum of American History

• Newberry Library

• Terra Foundation for American Art

• Henry du Pont Winterthur Museum

Yale University, PhD '98

University of Chicago, PhD '72

BIOGRAPHY

Ron Inden investigates Indian class formations in relation to changes in world ruling classes and the ways in which people have tried to articulate these changes with intellectual practices and national and ethnic "identities" in the twentieth century. He is particularly interested in people's efforts to construct paradises or utopias on earth in and beside their everyday lives. These involve practices ranging from "rituals" in medieval or traditional societies to the "media" in modern ones and, especially in India, the world of cinema. The problems of how people have situated and resituated these differing practices in a "developing" country like India bring together my historical, anthropological, and Indological interests.