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

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 Wisconsin-Madison, PhD ' 72

BIOGRAPHY

Kathleen Neils Conzen’s research and teaching has focused on the social and political history of the nineteenth- century United States, with particular concern for themes of immigration, ethnicity, religion, western expansion, and urban development. Much of her research and writing has used the German immigrant experience to explore links between migration processes and community formation; ethnic and other identities; interrelationships among religious, ethnic, and regional cultures; and the political integration of immigrant minorities into the national community. Current projects include explorations of the role of German immigrants in the emergence of California's nineteenth-century wine industry and of German American efforts to develop and defend a theory of pluralistic democratic nationalism.

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

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.

PhD Harvard University
BA Swarthmore College

RESEARCH INTERESTS

US history; disability history and studies; social movements and policy; history of medicine; history of technology; gender and sexuality; history of education 

BIOGRAPHY

Madeline J. Williams is a historian of disability and of the United States. Her work positions disability as both a kind of lived experience and as a powerful framework for analyzing politics and culture. She researches and teaches about disability as fundamentally intersecting and interacting with race, class, gender, sexuality, and more.

Her current book project, Disability Democracy: Blind-Led Organizing and the Making of the Modern America, tells the story of a crucial early chapter in the long history of social movement building around disability. It centers on the emergence and activities of political associations led by blind Americans. Activists founded these associations across the United States beginning in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Organizers built on the social connections, technological innovations, and skills gained from their education at residential state schools for blind children founded by Christian philanthropists during the 1830s. The associations arose in response to significant transformations of American state and society. In the wake of the formal end of chattel slavery, the elaboration of a Jim Crow order maintained and extended racial hierarchies in all spheres of national life. This context, coupled with intensifying economic inequality and the rise of a mainstream eugenics movement, shaped the blind-led associations’ work, including the horizons and limitations of their imagination for changemaking. Among other achievements, blind activists were remarkably effective at promoting policy initiatives through grassroots campaigns at the state level. Some of these policies would have unexpected afterlives in major federal disability programs through the twentieth century and into the present day. Disability Democracy demonstrates the place of disabled-led organizing as one of the crucial social movements that forged the modern United States.

Williams’s work has been supported by research and funding bodies including the American Historical Association (AHA); the Center for American Political Studies (CAPS); the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History; the Consortium for History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (CHSTM); and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. She holds a BA from Swarthmore College and a PhD from Harvard University.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Disability Democracy: Blind-Led Organizing and the Making of Modern America, in preparation.

“Reading the Past to Design Accessible Futures: Blindness and Education from Nineteenth-Century Tactile Books to Twenty-First-Century 3-D Printing,” American Quarterly 71, no. 4 (2019): 1111–1140.

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.

Harvard University, PhD '05

BIOGRAPHY

A deep and abiding interest in the interactions between Asian Americans and African Americans drives my first book manuscript. Focusing primarily on the home front culture of World War II, but utilizing the necessary bookends of the Popular Front of the 1930s and the Cold War of the 1950s, my monograph interrogates the ways in which different racialized and ethnic groups interacted during a heightened sense of possibility for an American multiracial democracy. Unpublished diaries of incarcerated Japanese American, Charles Kikuchi, serve as a narrative through-line for the manuscript—he wrote every day of his life, from the bombing of Pearl Harbor until his death in 1988. While Kikuchi can be considered one of a handful of radical Nisei (second-generation) intellectuals consumed by the constitutional violation of Japanese Americans, he was most deeply concerned with the welfare of African Americans and other oppressed minorities. Recognition of their equality by the rest of the nation would prove key to the fulfillment of democracy at home and abroad. My book therefore considers prototypes for Kikuchi, like Karl Yoneda, a highly visible Communist Party member during the Popular Front, intellectual mentors during the war, such as immigrant activist Louis Adamic, W.I. Thomas, and Dorothy Thomas, social scientists associated with, respectively, the Chicago school of sociology and Japanese evacuation and resettlement study, and “everyday people,” from African Americans on the South Side of Chicago to Filipino migratory farm laborers in central California. The Cold War closes off some of the interracial and democratic possibilities of this fertile intellectual era, but not before a constellation of radical counterpublics appear on the national and international maps. A cartography of this period, therefore, demonstrates not only the importance of reexamination of the Kikuchi diaries, but also the efforts and limits of these particular publics to repossess, reclaim, and redefine American democracy.  

I have been honored to be a dissertation fellow at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, and an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow. Prior to Chicago, I taught at Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, and most recently, the University of Michigan.