New York University, PhD '10

BIOGRAPHY

Rashauna Johnson is a historian of the 19th-century African diaspora, with an emphasis on slavery and emancipation in the US South and Atlantic World. She is especially interested in the limits and possibilities of archival histories of enslaved and freed people and the worlds in which they labored and lived. Johnson teaches courses on race, slavery, and nation; methodologies of slavery studies; and the 19th-century US.

Johnson is the author of Slavery’s Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans during the Age of Revolutions (Cambridge UP, 2016; paperback 2018), which was awarded the 2016 Williams Prize for the best book in Louisiana history and the 2018 H. L. Mitchell Award by the Southern Historical Association for the best book on the southern working class. Slavery's Metropolis was also named a finalist for the 2016 Berkshire Conference of Women's Historians Book Prize, honorable mention for the Urban History Association's Kenneth Jackson Award, and a finalist for the 2017 Frederick Douglass Book Prize. Her second book, a forthcoming study of family, race, and region in rural Louisiana, will be published by Cambridge University Press. That project has been supported by the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University, the Mellon Scholars Post-Doctoral Fellowship in African American History at the Library Company of Philadelphia, and The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. In addition, she is a coeditor of The Cambridge History of the African Diaspora.

Johnson serves extensively within and beyond the profession. She has been a member of several book prize committees, including Wesley-Logan (AHA), David Montgomery (OAH), and Harriet Tubman (Schomburg), as well as program and fellowship committees. She is an OAH Distinguished Lecturer, a member of the Omohundro Institute Council, and a former board member of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD). Consistent with her commitment to engaged scholarship beyond the profession, Johnson regularly delivers lectures to public and private high schoolers, and she has taught GED and literature courses in correctional facilities.

Johnson grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana. She earned a BA in Afro-American Studies and political science from Howard University, where she graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. She earned a PhD in history from New York University. Her graduate studies were supported in part by the Andrew Mellon Predoctoral Fellowship in the Humanistic Studies, and her dissertation received NYU’s 2011 Dean's Outstanding Dissertation Award in the Humanities. She is also the recipient of the Drusilla Dunjee Houston Award given by the Association of Black Woman Historians. She taught in the history department at Dartmouth College for nine years, where she directed the foreign study program in London (2017) and the honors program (2019-20). She was also affiliated with the Program in African and African American Studies (AAAS), and served on the advisory board for the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF) Program.

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Labor and gender history, occupational health, racial formation, and knowledge production.

DISSERTATION

Danger: Women at Work in the United States, 1970-2000

PUBLICATION

Review, "Immunity, Capitalism, and the Antebellum New Orleans," of Kathryn Olivarius’s Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom in Black Perspectives by the African American Intellectual History Society, 2022.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, PhD '11

BIOGRAPHY

Michael Rossi is an historian of medicine and science in the United States from the nineteenth century to the present. His work focuses on the historical and cultural metaphysics of the body: how different people at different times understood questions of beauty, truth, falsehood, pain, pleasure, goodness, and reality vis-à-vis their corporeal selves and those of others. 

His first book manuscript traces the origins of color science—the physiology, psychology, and physics of color—in the late-nineteenth-century United States to a series of questions about what modern America ought to be: about the scope of medical, scientific, and political authority over the sensing body; about the nature of aesthetic, physiological, and cultural development between individual and civilization; about the relationship between aesthetic harmony, physiological balance, and social order.

His second project looks at how linguists, anatomists, and speech pathologists moved, over the course of the twentieth century, from viewing language as a function of sound-producing organs (tongue, lips, palate, larynx, etc.) to searching for a notional “language organ” within the brains of all human beings. Such interpretative shifts in understanding human anatomy are neither an ancient phenomenon nor one limited to extreme medical specialization, but rather are ongoing issues, providing a window on the social, political, and philosophical understanding of modern bodies, medicine, and science.

Prior to Chicago, Michael was a postdoctoral fellow in the Groupe Histoire des sciences de l’homme at the Ecole Normale Superieur de Cachan in France. He received a PhD in the history and anthropology of science, technology, and society from MIT and an AB from Columbia University.

Harvard University, PhD' 90

BIOGRAPHY

I am a historian of Britain and its Empire, of comparative revolutions, comparative empires, and of northern Europe more broadly. I am both a deeply committed archival historian and a scholar who believes profoundly that historians should engage with the social sciences. My first book, Protestantism and Patriotism, was an entangled and comparative study of English and Dutch politics, culture, and society in the mid-seventeenth century. I traced the decline of apocalyptic thinking and the rise of notions of political economy in England and the Dutch Republic. My second major monograph, 1688: The First Modern Revolution, offered both a major revisionist account of England's Glorious Revolution and a reappraisal of the literature on revolutions more broadly. I showed that far from being an unrevolutionary revolution, the Revolution of 1688 radically transformed English state and society. The revolution, I suggest, can only be understood by placing it in a European and global context. Since 1688 was a radical revolution, I suggest, it is imperative to rethink the nature of revolutions since so much of that literature assumed that the later eighteenth-century French Revolution was the first modern revolution. My third monograph, The Heart of the Declaration, argued that by placing the American Revolution and its seminal document, the Declaration of Independence, in an imperial rather than proto-national context it becomes clear that Americans broke away from Britain not because they resented the imperial state but because they wanted a different kind of state—one that would actively promote social and economic prosperity and equality.

 I am currently engaged in a number of research projects. For the past decade I have been working on a Global History of the British Empire, ca. 1650–1784. This book, based on research in a wide range of European, North American, and West Indian archives, insists that the British imperial state was just as institutional strong if structurally distinct, from its rivals. Throughout the empire Britons debated and fought over the kind of imperial state they wanted. Some wanted to focus on a political economy that privileged colonial production over one that emphasized colonial consumption; some wanted an empire that favored England, while others thought the empire should be organized as a confederation; some thought chattel slavery was essential to the prosperity of the empire while others decried cattle slavery as economically and morally deleterious; some thought the empire should protect and promote the development of indigenous peoples, while others thought indigenous peoples were a barrier to imperial development. I insist that accounts of the colonies that focus on the binary relationship between a particular colony or set of colonies and Britain will necessarily misunderstand that relationship. The British Empire can only be understood as a global phenomenon. It is essential to think the empire whole. I am working on a second monograph, Partners in Revolution, that compares the Irish Revolution of 1782 and the American Revolution. I highlight the social, cultural, and ideological similarities between the Irish and American situations. The book explains why Americans severed ties with the British Empire and the Irish did not. I suggest that one of the consequences of the abortive Irish Revolution was that the re-emergence of confessional divisions in Ireland. Finally, I am working on a set of essays (maybe a book) with James Robinson of Harris Public Policy, trying to explain British divergence: why was it that Britain, and not China, India, France, or the Dutch Republic, became the first industrial nation? Why did the British state take the distinctive form that it did?

My research has been supported over the years with fellowships from the Harvard Society of Fellows, the ACLS, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center, the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the American Philosophical Society. I have been a visitor at All Souls College (Oxford), EHESS (Paris), IMT (Lucca) and the University of Warwick.

I am deeply committed to both undergraduate and graduate education. I am happy to supervise senior theses and doctoral dissertations on any topic in British history, the history of the British Empire, Atlantic history, Dutch history, political economy, revolutions, comparative empires, history of European ideas, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century religious history, and the cultural history of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe.

I have supervised over twenty doctoral dissertations covering a wide range of topics. Some topics have included the origins of humanitarianism in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, the rise of the Patriot party in the eighteenth-century British Empire, the emergence of associational life in the British Empire, the East India Company and the emergence of British India, politics of the navy and the British Empire, the transformation of British India in the late eighteenth century, the Anglo-French-Indian struggle for the Ohio Valley, British imperial indigenous policy in Scotland, North America, and Bengal, the high church reaction to the Revolution of 1688, the remaking of the Church of England after the Act of Toleration, the Scottish Kirk in the early eighteenth century, the rise of opera in Britain, the making of the English Caribbean in the late seventeenth century, British monetary policy in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the rise of slave labor in the British Empire, Leisler's Rebellion and its consequences, British party politics in the early eighteenth century, the persistence of Catholicism in the British Empire, and many more.

I am a co-convenor of the History and Social Sciences and the Empires and the Atlantics forums.

Brown University, Ph'D 02

Office Hours:
Spring Quarter 2025
https://calendly.com/jtsparrow/office-hours

BIOGRAPHY

I am an historian of modern US politics broadly construed, with special interests in the mutual constitution of social categories, democratic publics, and state formation.

My first book, Warfare State, is a history of the social politics of the national state as its foundations shifted from welfare to warfare during World War II. Its central concern is to examine the ways in which different groups of citizens encountered the burgeoning warfare state and in the process accepted, rejected, or otherwise contested the legitimacy of expanding federal authority in everyday life, thereby shaping the horizons of political possibility for decades.

I am currently completing a sequel to Warfare State tentatively titled Sovereign Discipline: The American Extraterritorial State in the Atomic Age. This book examines the mass politics of extraterritorial sovereignty, and the crisis of legitimacy it engendered, from V-E Day to the Cuban Missile Crisis. My third book project is also nearing completion. It is an intellectual history titled New Leviathan: Rethinking Sovereignty and Political Agency after Total War.

Much of this recent work is informed by a long-term collaborative research project on the problem of the democratic state, which has benefitted from two Neubauer Collegium project grants for which I am codirector ("The State as History and Theory" and "The Problem of the Democratic State in US History"), and resulted in the edited collection Boundaries of the State in US History as well as two special issues of the Tocqueville Review.

My teaching interests include both graduate and undergraduate courses on the history of US politics, diplomacy, and war; social engineering; social movements; citizenship; America in the world; the American state; and a set of undergraduate research seminars on the history of the New Deal, the early Cold War, and digital history. I am also committed to teaching in Chicago's distinctive Core Curriculum. It is one of the oldest general education curricula in the United States, engaging foundational works and questions in the humanistic social sciences for decades since the 1930s.

Yale University, PhD' 18

Office Hours
Spring Quarter 2025
https://calendly.com/gwinant

BIOGRAPHY

Gabriel Winant is a historian of the social structures of inequality in modern American capitalism. His work approaches capitalism as an expansive social order—not confined to the market alone but rather structurally composed of multiple, heterogeneous spheres. He focuses on the relationship between economic production and formal employment on the one hand, and the social reproduction and governance of the population on the other. Broadly, he is interested in transformations in the social division of labor and the making and management of social difference through this process.

His first book, The Next Shift: The Fall of Manufacturing and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America investigates the rise of the “service economy” in the aftermath of manufacturing. The Next Shift locates the origins of today’s social inequality in America’s postwar political economy. Across the Rust Belt, the health care industry today dominates employment, accounting for one in five jobs in places like Detroit, Rochester, Baltimore, and Pittsburgh. As the care economy has grown, it has been an engine of insecurity for workers, who are overwhelmingly women and people of color employed at low wages and in precarious positions. Using Pittsburgh as a case study, The Next Shift shows how deindustrialization triggered the ascent of the care economy and stamped it with the inequalities produced by the New Deal state’s hierarchies of race and gender.

His second project, tentatively titled Our Weary Years: How the Working Class Survived Industrial America, explores similar problems in an earlier period. This project will examine the relationship between several key historical phenomena in capitalist development at the turn of the twentieth century: the survival strategies of new migrants in cities like Chicago and New York—often involving practices that were cooperative, informal, illicit, or illegal; the rise of mass production and the ensuing large-scale imbalances between production and consumption; and the construction and contestation of a new set of norms against informal, cooperative, and illicit—that is, non-market—survival strategies and the social worlds that sustained them.

Before coming to the University of Chicago, Winant was a visiting scholar at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He also writes frequently for publications such as the Nation, Dissent, and n+1.