Princeton University, PhD '92

BIOGRAPHY

I have spent most of my intellectual life shuttling between the micro and the macro, trying to understand how life and ideas shape and are shaped by each other. One stream of my work has approached these questions through religion, focusing on the ways in which Jewish, Christian, and Islamic cultures constitute themselves by interrelating with or thinking about each other. My first book, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages, studied social interaction between the three groups within the context of Spain and France in order to understand the role of violence in shaping the possibilities for coexistence. In later projects I explored the work that “Judaism,” “Christianity,” and “Islam” do as figures in each other’s thought. One product of that approach, focused on art history, was (jointly with Herb Kessler) Judaism and Christian Art: Aesthetic Anxieties from the Catacombs to Colonialism (2011). In Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (2013), I attempted to apply the methodology to a very longue durée, studying the work done by pagan, Christian, Muslim, and secular thinking about Jews and Judaism in the history of ideas. More or less simultaneously in Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism Medieval and Modern (2014), I tried to bring the social into conversation with the hermeneutic, in order to show how, in multireligious societies, interactions between lived experiences and conceptual categories shape how adherents of all three religions perceive themselves and each other. Then in Aesthetic Theology and Its Enemies: Judaism in Christian Painting, Poetry, and Politics (2015), I focused on how thinking about Judaism shaped the ways in which Christian cultures could imagine the possibilities and limits of community and communication.

Beginning with my book Anti-Judaism, which stretched from ancient Egypt to the twentieth century in order to try to understand the work done by a family of concepts across history, I have tried to cultivate a new approach to the “long history” of ideas. My most recent book, Uncountable: A Philosophical History of Number and Humanity from Antiquity to the Present, written in collaboration with Ricardo Nirenberg (a mathematician who happens also to be my father), follows this path as well.  It explores the long history of the various types of sameness that underpin the claims of different forms of knowledge (from poetry and dreams, to monotheism, math, and physics), using these to think critically about the powers and the limits of the sciences and the humanities.  I am now at work on the long history of yet another family of concepts, namely the inter-connected history of race and religion from the Neolithic to the present.

University of Chicago, PhD '08

BIOGRAPHY

I am a historian of the economy, the United States, and capitalism. In addition to being a member of the Department of History and the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought I am the current Faculty Director of the Law, Letters, and Society program.

My most recent book is Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States (Random House, 2021), which is a history of American economic life from British colonial settlement through the Great Recession. The book is also a single-volume history of the United States.

My next book, The Real Economy: History and Theory (Princeton University Press, forthcoming 2025) argues for a novel theory of the economy, its history, and its politics. It draws inspiration from the economics of Thorstein Veblen and John Maynard Keynes, and seeks to offer a theory of the economy that is open to rich empirical and theoretical study from across the social sciences and humanities.

My future research projects include The Midas Touch, a global history of the demand for money from ancient times through the present, as well a planetary history of the city of Houston. I wrote a series of essays on Houston for the Visualizing Climate and Loss Project at Harvard’s Center for History and Economics.

My book, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Harvard, 2012), won the Organization of American Historians' Frederick Jackson Turner Award, Ellis W. Hawley Prize, and Avery O. Craven Award and the American Society for Legal History's William Nelson Cromwell Book Prize.

Recent Courses Offered

Undergraduate

• Property and the Public Interest
• The United States, 2000-2008
• History of Populism in the United States

Graduate

• The Global History of Money
• Topics in US History: The New Deal
• Emergence of Capitalism

University of Cambridge, PhD '06

BIOGRAPHY

I am an historian of modern social and political thought.  I focus in particular on American and British traditions of social thought. My earliest research examined how theories of knowledge drove important changes in the human sciences during the twentieth century. Much of this work found its way into my first book, Working Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), which was awarded the Gladstone Prize by the Royal Historical Society, UK.

I am currently writing a book about the relations between economics and social thought from the late nineteenth century to the present.  The aim of this project is to explain the ways in which modern economics has shaped – whether by attraction or repulsion – the development of social theory and political thought.  The major topics addressed by the book include the diffusion of rational choice theory across the human sciences, and the reception of Enlightenment thought about politics and markets.

I also work on issues in the history of modern philosophy, American history and the history of the Cold War.

Before joining the University of Chicago, I held positions at the University of Cambridge (2011-2017) and Queen Mary, University of London (2007-2011).

Columbia University, PhD '94

BIOGRAPHY

My research and teaching focus on the intellectual and cultural history of Europe in the Middle Ages, with particular emphasis on the history of Christianity in the Latin West. I also offer courses on the history of European civilization and the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. My ongoing research addresses the interplay between intellect and empathy in the practical development of a discipline of prayer. My immediate purpose is to find a way to describe prayer as a practical art, that is, as a practice that takes skill and uses particular tools. My ultimate goal is to develop an understanding of the meaning and importance of worship as itself a creative act.

In my research I have paid special attention to the medieval devotion to the Virgin Mary. Why? Because Mary is more than just the Virgin whom Christians believe gave birth to the Son of God. She is the key that unlocks the medieval era itself. As I argue in the proposal for the Companion to the Christian Tradition that I have been invited to edit for Brill, to understand the place of Mary in medieval Christian devotion, it is not enough to study her as an art historian or a musicologist or a literary scholar or an historian or a theologian. To understand Mary as medieval Christians imagined her, one has to understand everything. She is there in the art and the architecture and the music. She is there in the literature and the liturgy and the liberal arts. She is there in the most elevated expressions of human imagination and in the humblest prayers for help. She is there in the politics and in the ideals of marriage, in battle cries and in pleas for mercy for the oppressed. Medieval Christianity is inconceivable without her, and yet, since the Reformation, Christians have struggled to explain why she should have been there at all. “All the steam in the world,” Bostonian Henry Adams (d. 1918) once opined, “could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres.” He might better have said, “build Christendom.”

In my first book, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 (Columbia, 2002), my primary goal was to find a way to make a hitherto obscure tradition of scriptural commentary readable as a form of devotion. For my second book, Mary and the Art of Prayer: The Hours of the Virgin in Medieval Christian Life and Thought (Columbia, 2017), I wanted to take this exercise further and find a way to help modern academic and lay readers imagine seeing the world as a medieval Christian might, from within, while at the same time making clear what it took for medieval Christians to construct that worldview. My sources for this second project were similar to those that I used for my first book: liturgical chants and prayers, commentaries on scripture, stories told about the miracles of the Virgin, sculpted and painted images, all situated in the biographies of their authors and the larger transformations of the society and tradition in which they were produced. My question was likewise similar: what did it mean for medieval Christians to pray to the Virgin Mary as the Mother of God and to Jesus Christ as her Son? But my goal was somewhat more ambitious: not just to show modern readers how medieval Christians talked about Mary and her Son, but to give modern readers some sense of what it was like to see the world through this devotional and theological frame.

I apply a similar methodology in my teaching. Why do I teach medieval European history? Because story matters. More particularly: because the stories with which we fill our imaginations shape our souls as well as our actions in the world. All of the courses that I teach begin from this premise: that the study of history is valuable not just for the skills that it imparts, but also for its content because it is the content of its stories that gives shape to our understanding of ourselves and our world. The humanities as a whole have become heavily invested in the intersection of identity and practice over the past thirty or so years, but history has always been about identity—about our particular identities as individuals and about our shared identity as human beings. It is the practice of telling ourselves, as human beings, who we are.

In all my courses, I focus on helping students become aware of the way in which stories frame the way they think about the past, while at the same time encouraging them to read the sources I assign for the questions that they were originally intended to answer; that is, to look for the frames within which they were originally written. In my two-quarter section of Chicago’s core sequence “History of European Civilization,” this exercise takes the form of particular questions that I have the students ask about each text that we read: What does the author tell us (explicitly or implicitly) about why he or she was writing? Why was the author’s subject so important that he or she considered it worth writing about? What does the author’s interest in the subject tell us about the historical circumstances in which he or she was writing? In my undergraduate and graduate courses in medieval history and the history of Christianity, my methodology is the same, if less explicit: to think ourselves inside the frame(s) from within which our sources were written so as to attempt to understand why their authors made the arguments that they did in the way that they did and thereby become aware of the limitations of our own frames.

Such an exercise is necessarily always contingent and provisional, subject to revision as we read further into the sources, become aware of new elements in the story, and encounter assumptions for which we have no interpretive frame. My own teacher Caroline Walker Bynum coined the phrase “history in the comic mode” to describe this process. As Bruce Holsinger and I explained in the afterword to the Festschrift that we co-edited in her honor, 

History in the comic mode challenges us as scholars (and storytellers) to recognize not only our endings, that is, our answers—carefully articulated on the basis of a proper weighting of the evidence in context, balanced against all the slippages and silences of the sources themselves—as constructions, but also our beginnings; the punch line is only funny, the answer is only satisfying, if we accept the premise of the joke...

As with all comedy, such an openness [to our own contingency] involves risks—we cannot be sure of our audience’s response any more than we can of our answers—and yet, we would insist, to refuse to take these risks out of otherwise commendable concerns for objectivity or methodological applicability, never mind contemporary political urgency, is less a mark of serious scholarly rigor than it is a tragic refusal to join in the fun.

I want my students to join in the fun, even as it challenges them to take risks, even as it threatens to overturn everything they have previously learned about the past—or about themselves.

Princeton University, PhD '95

BIOGRAPHY

I am a professor in History, the College, and the Law School. My most recent book, White Fright: The Sexual Panic at the Heart of America's Racist History (Basic Book, 2020), concerns race, sex, and the civil rights movement from emancipation to the present. My next most recent book is Building the American Republic, Volume 2: A Narrative History From 1877 (Chicago, 2018). Both volumes are free in e-book form.

My work has revolved around the relationship between race, sex, and politics in the post-Emancipation South. My first book, Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia (North Carolina, 2000), analyzed the conditions that facilitated and, ultimately, undid interracial democracy in the post–Civil War South. An edited collection with Glenda E. Gilmore and Bryant Simon, Jumpin' Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights (Princeton, 2000), continued the theme of African American resistance to white domination from Reconstruction through the 1950s. A third book, The Age of Jim Crow: A Norton Documentary History (Norton, 2008), examines the creation and dissolution of legal segregation in America through primary sources.

My awards include fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Academy in Berlin, the Alphonse Fletcher Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

New York University, PhD '15

BIOGRAPHY

I am a scholar of the modern Middle East specializing in the historical geography of global capitalism, comparative studies of colonialism and empire, and environmental history.

Over the past decade of research and teaching, my overarching concern has been to address, simultaneously, two related challenges. First, as a historian of the postcolonial world, I am to pursue and develop new approaches to the critical study of global capitalism that demonstrate the continued relevance of insights and concerns that have animated the long and varied tradition of political economy. But second, drawing directly on the critiques of Eurocentrism and economic determinism that have been so central to the project of postcolonial studies, I seed to produce and teach historical narratives that unsettle the longstanding tendency to treat the “rest of the world” as mere passive recipients of ideas and processes that originate elsewhere.

My first book project, Egypt’s Occupation: Colonial Economism and the Crises of Capitalism (Stanford University Press, 2020) explores both the political economy of the Egyptian state and the role of political-economic thought in the struggle over British rule in Egypt following the occupation of 1882. For decades, Egypt has stood as a paradigmatic case of peripheral development in the capitalist world economy. From this perspective, the advent of Britain’s “veiled protectorate” after 1882 simply reinforced Egypt’s prior status as a vast plantation for the production of raw cotton and a market for industrial goods from Europe. All but obscured in such accounts is Egypt’s emergence as a key site for investment and experimentation in the worldwide financial expansion that characterized global capitalism at the close of the nineteenth century. Egypt’s Occupation tells the story of that financial boom and the crisis that followed. And the book goes on to demonstrate that this long-neglected process of financialization was of central importance to the politics of British rule. Across the four decades from the invasion of 1882 to Britain’s unilateral declaration of Egyptian independence in 1922, Egypt’s Occupation traces the complex career of the discourse I refer to as “colonial economism.” From the outset, British officials held that Egyptians, as racially distinctive human subjects, were capable of no more and no less than a bare recognition of their immediate material interests; the legitimacy of imperial rule would, accordingly, vary as a direct function of the “economic development” that British reform could deliver. In grappling with a discourse of colonial improvement that appeared to be succeeding on its own terms, Egypt’s early nationalist thinkers elaborated their own alternative accounts of the ephemeral and uneven qualities of financialization. They thereby articulated a range of rigorous, if fragmentary, critiques of the political and economic theories upon which the British had built their project of rule. In time, these efforts to find grounds for national sovereignty beyond the mere calculus of economic gain and lost shaped both the conceptual apparatus and the political strategies through which a growing nationalist movement sought to bring the occupation to an end.

Over the past few years, I have begun work on a new project, tentatively entitled Tilted Waters: The World the Suez Canal Made. Spanning more than two centuries, from the earliest European proposals to excavate a channel through the Isthmus of Suez to the Egyptian military regime’s current efforts to remake the waterway and its environs  into a major processing hub and free trade zone, the book will explore the many and shifting roles that the Suez Canal has played in the production of global inequalities.

Before joining the Department of History, I was assistant professor of historical studies at The New School in New York City. I have also held fellowships at Yale University’s Program in Agrarian Studies and George Washington University’s Institute for Middle East Studies.

Yale University, PhD '90

BIOGRAPHY

Amy Dru Stanley is a historian of the United States, with particular interest in law, capitalism, freedom and unfreedom, human rights, the relationship between the household and economic life, and the historical experience of moral problems. Her work has appeared in scholarly books and journals, as well as in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Nation, Dissent, Slate, and Jacobin. She has received the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching and the Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and Mentoring. In 2018, she was the jury chair for the Pulitzer Prize in history.

Yale University, PhD '09

BIOGRAPHY

I am an historian of modern Russia, with a special interest in nineteenth- and twentieth-century politics, culture, and ideas. My work explores how Russia's peculiar political institutions—and its status as a multiethnic empire—shaped public opinion and political cultures. It also interrogates Russia's relationship with the outside world, asking where the Russian experience belongs in the broader context of European and global history. In addition, I am interested in the theory and practice of the digital humanities.

My most recent book, Utopia’s Discontents: Russian Exiles and the Quest for Freedom, 1830–1930, was published by Oxford University Press in 2021. It is the recipient of the 2022 Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize from ASEEES, which recognizes the most important contribution in any discipline of Slavic studies. The book provides the first synthetic account of Europe's "Russian colonies"—boisterous and politically fractious communities formed by exiles from the Russian empire that emerged across the continent in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book treats the "Russian colonies" as utopian communities in which radical activists worked to transform social relations and individual behavior, and it explores how these unique spaces influenced Russian political imaginaries as well as the culture of their host societies. Ultimately, the project offers a bold reassessment of Russia's relationship with Europe, the origins of the Russian revolution, and the creation of the Bolshevik regime.

My first book, Children of Rus’: Right-Bank Ukraine and the Invention of a Russian Nation, was published by Cornell University Press in 2013 and released in paperback in 2017. Children of Rus' argues that it was on the extreme periphery of the tsarist empire—a region that today is located at the very center of the independent nation of Ukraine—that Russian nationalism first took shape and assumed its most potent form. The book reconstructs how nineteenth-century provincial intellectuals came to see local folk customs as the purest manifestation of an ancient nation that unified all the Orthodox East Slavs, and how they successfully propagated their ideas across the empire through lobbying and mass political mobilization. In addition, it reconceptualizes state-society relations under tsarism, showing how residents of a diverse and contested peripheral region managed to shape political ideas and identities across Russia—and even beyond its borders. Children of Rus' was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2013.

I am currently working on a new history of the origins of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion written for a popular audience. This book offers a new account of how this notorious text came to be, and it asks what history's greatest conspiracy theory can tell us about the present moment, when conspiratorial thinking is again on the rise in society and politics.

My current research is enriched by technology, and I am interested in thinking through how historians can use digital tools to open new avenues for exploration and to communicate their findings to other scholars and the general public. I am particularly interested in using geo-spatial analysis to analyze flows of people, ideas, and commodities over time and across space. For examples of my (ongoing) work in digital cartography, see my Utopia's Discontents website in development and my study of émigré publications.

I have held research fellowships at Columbia, Harvard, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. My research has been funded by ACLS, IREX, Fulbright-Hays, and the NEH.

I am represented by Kathleen Anderson (kathleen@andersonliterary.com) of Anderson Literary Management.

University of Chicago, PhD '94

BIOGRAPHY

I am a historian of Japan's "long" nineteenth century (1780s–1910s). I am interested in the social history of intellectual and cultural practices and the continuities and ruptures between what conventional periodization terms Japan's "early modern" and "modern" eras. My first book, Before the Nation: Kokugaku and the Imagining of Community in Early Modern Japan (Duke, 2003) examined the nativist discourse of the late Tokugawa period. It traced the efforts of early nineteenth century intellectuals to define the nature of "Japan" as a locus of personal and cultural identity and the appropriation of aspects of this discourse by modern scholars who sought to define the contours of modern Japanese nationalism.

With the completion of this project I turned to a new set of questions related to the history of the body as it came to be conceptualized within medical and legal discourses. My second monograph, Kingdom of the Sick: Leprosy, Citizenship, and Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2019) explores the long history of leprosy in Japan from the late medieval period when it was identified as a "karmic retribution disease" to the modern period when attempts to control the disease prompted the creation of a system of public sanitaria. I argue that in the modern era leprosy, a particularly stigmatized disease, became the object of an intense debate on the place of the chronically ill and disabled within the Japanese nation.

Gender is an important category of analysis within my work and I have a long-standing interesting in issues of reproductive health and reproductive rights. Together with Barbara Brooks, I co-edited Gender and Law in the Japanese Imperium (Hawaii, 2014). I authored the introduction and contributed an essay that examined the criminalization of abortion and infanticide in late nineteenth-century Japan.

I am currently working on two additional monographs. The first explores the intellectual and professional world of an early modern doctor who practiced in the villages in Akita in the 1830s and '40s. It seeks to explore the impact of new forms of knowledge, techniques, and materia medica for medical practice and considers the implications of the "medical revolution" of the early nineteenth century for the state-sponsored introduction of Western biomedicine after 1870. The second builds on my research on medical commodities, alternative therapies, and psychiatric practice and explores the impact of the new medical marketplace on ideas about mental health in Japan from c. 1880–1940.

In recent years, I have become interested in the use of digital tools for historical research, specifically ArcGIS and text mining. I utilized ArcGIS in my research on leprosy to explore the place of private leprosy hospitals and clinics in the cityscape of late nineteenth-century Tokyo. I am working on a digital project called "Mapping Medical Tokyo" that seeks to visualize and analyze the spatial dimensions of health, disease, and medical care in the Meiji-era city.

My work has been supported by the Fulbright-Hays Fellowship, the IIE Fulbright, the Japan Foundation, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Courses

• Gender and Sexuality in World Civilizations (undergraduate)

• Edo/Tokyo: Society and the City in Japan (undergrad/grad)

• Medicine and Culture in East Asia (undergrad/grad)

• Contact Zones: Treaty Ports in Nineteenth Century Japan (undergrad/grad)

• Gender and Japanese History (undergrad/grad)

Harvard University, PhD '96

BIOGRAPHY

Emilio Kourí's main scholarly interest is in the history of rural Mexico since Independence, including society, economy, politics, culture, and the law. He is the author of A Pueblo Divided: Business, Property, and Community in Papantla, Mexico. It tells the story of the strife-ridden transformation of rural social relations in the Totonac region of Papantla during the course of the nineteenth century, paying particular attention to how the progressive development of a campesino-based international vanilla economy changed and ultimately undermined local forms of communal landholding. A Pueblo Divided received the 2005 Bolton-Johnson Prize from the Conference on Latin American History (CLAH) and the 2005 Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Prize (Honorable Mention) from the American Society for Ethnohistory. He is also the editor of En busca de Molina Enríquez: cien años de Los Grandes Problemas Nacionales and co-editor of Revolución y exilio en la historia de México: Homenaje a Friedrich Katz.

He is at work on a three-volume history of communal landholding in Mexico. Volume One examines the evolving meaning and practice of communal land tenure in Mexican villages during the 18th and 19th centuries, focusing on changes brought about by agricultural commerce and commodification, population growth and mobility, socio-economic differentiation within and beyond villages, and the haphazard implementation of a multiplicity of liberal disentailment laws. Volume Two focuses on the Zapatista movement of the Mexican Revolution, offering a revisionist interpretation of its agrarian and political goals and practices and of its place in the land reform that would follow its demise. Volume Three explains the legal, political, and ideological origins of the collective land-grant community (ejido) created by the Mexican Revolution between 1915 and 1934. By 1992, when a constitutional amendment ended the redistribution program, more than two thirds of Mexico’s arable lands and forests were at least nominally in the hands of these land-grant communities—the most extensive state-managed land tenure transformation in the history of modern Latin America. Historians have long regarded the communal character given to ejido property as a return to forms of social organization rooted in Mexico’s indigenous past, and have considered it to be the fulfillment, at least in principle, of what villagers like Emiliano Zapata had long demanded and fought for. Against prevailing interpretations, Volume Three argues that the new ejido of the Revolution was not what country people (and especially the Zapatistas) had battled for. Rather, it was the piecemeal product of idealized notions of indigenous communal organization and historical practice hastily contrived by the "progressive" elites who won the Revolution and who were then compelled in fits and starts to make expedient agrarian reforms in order to build sorely needed popular political allegiances.

He teaches classes and seminars on land reforms, rural ecologies and social movements, indigenous societies, and the history of agrarian thought, as well as general courses on Latin American and Latino/a history, and is director of the Katz Center for Mexican Studies.

Recent Course Offerings

• Tropical Commodities in Latin America

• Latin American History Seminar

• Zapatista Social Movements, Old and New

• Agrarian Reform in Twentieth-Century Mexico

• The History of Mexico, 1876 to the Present

• Pre-Columbian and Early Colonial Latin America

• US Latinos: Origins and Histories

• Latin American Civilizations