Serena Covkin earned her PhD from the University of Chicago in Autumn 2023, with a dissertation entitled “Fighting in Court: Women, War, and the Law in Twentieth-Century America.” She also holds an MA from the University of Chicago and a BA from the University of Pennsylvania.
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Modern South Asia, British empire, global history, federalism, legal and constitutional history, postcolonial histories/subaltern studies, Indian princely states, history of Travancore/Kerala, decolonization, international law, self-determination, nationalism, and sovereignty
DISSERTATION
Federal Futures: Imagining Federation, Constitution, and World in Late Colonial India
BIOGRAPHY
Sarath Pillai is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI) at the University of Pennsylvania. He completed his Ph.D. in History with distinction from the University of Chicago in August 2022. He was a Fellow at the Hurst Institute in Legal History at the University of Wisconsin Law School in 2021. His Ph.D. dissertation, Federal Futures: Imagining Federation, Constitution, and World in Late Colonial India, studies the rise of federalist ideas in interwar India and their growing influence among various groups—nationalists, princes, liberals, and minorities—in the late 1920s through the 1940s. It presents an alternate genealogy of political thought, constitutionalism, and worldmaking in late colonial India by showing the deep fissures between those who wanted a unitary state (singular sovereignty) based on the British colonial state and those who wanted a federation (shared sovereignty) based on Euro-American constitutionalism. He draws on multi-lingual archives—marshaled through 18 months of archival research in three continents—to recover the underappreciated federalist imaginaries in late colonial South Asia.
He completed two major public history initiatives at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania as an intern in 2022-23. First, he wrote the first ever South Asia Subject guide for HSP, giving an overarching view of its South Asia collections from the 17th century to the present. Second, he inventoried the private papers of Harry Admason, a Philadelphia-based activist who was infected with HIV in 1982 and died in 2021. His papers are an unusual window to the world of gay rights, medical care, and the AIDS pandemic in Philadelphia. He was a Preceptor in the Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences (MAPSS) for two years and served as the Student Ombudsperson for the University for two years. He has taught in several core sequences in the College of the University of Chicago: for a year in "Self, Culture, Society" (social science core focused on social theory) and for a quarter each in "Colonizations-II" and "Introduction to South Asian Civilizations-II." He has also taught modern South Asian history and European history at Hindu College and Indraprastha College for Women, both under the University of Delhi. He holds a Master of studies in law from Yale Law School, a Master of arts in history from the University of Delhi, and a postgraduate diploma in archives and records management from the National Archives of India, Delhi.
His research has been supported by American Historical Association, Center for International Social Science Research(CISSR), Social Sciences Research Center (SSRC), Committee on Southern Asian Studies (COSAS), Nicholson Center for British Studies, History Department (Kunstader travel grant), Oscar M. Ruebhausen Fund for Research at Yale Law School, Humboldt-Yale History Network Travel Grant, Florence Tan Moeson Fellowship at the Library of Congress, Harry S Truman Library and Princeton University Library.
PUBLICATIONS
Peer Reviewed
“German Lessons: Comparative Constitutionalism, State Rights, and Federalist Imaginaries in Interwar India.” Comparative Studies in Society and History (July. 2023).
“Archiving Federally, Writing Regionally: Archival Practices and Princely State Histories in Postcolonial India,” Archives and Records, 42.2 (Oct. 2021): 149-166.
"Fragmenting the Nation: Divisible Sovereignty and Travancore's Quest for Federal Independence." Law and History Review 34, no. 3 (Aug. 2016): 743–82.
Book reviews
“The Politics of Democratic Planning in Postcolonial India,” review of Planning Democracy: How a Professor, an Institute, and an Idea Shaped India, by Nikhil Menon, Himal Southasian, April 25, 2023.
A Genealogy of Terrorism: Colonial Law and the Origins of an Idea,by Joseph McQuade, Global Nineteenth-Century Studies 1.2 (December, 2022): 229–231.
“Politics, Law, and ‘Founding Moments’ in Late Colonial India,” review of Norms and Politics: Sir B. N. Rau in the Making of the Indian Constitution, by Arvind Elangovan, The New Rambler, August 24, 2022.
“Whither India? Princely States and the End of Empire,” review of Princestan, by Sandeep Bamzai, The Book Review 45.5 (May 2021): 06-08.
"Harshan Kumarasingham, A Political Legacy of the British Empire: Power and the Parliamentary System in Post-colonial India and Sri Lanka." South Asia Research 35, no. 2 (July 2015): 272–76.
"Caroline Keen, Princely India and the British: Political Development and the Operation of Empire." South Asia Research 34, no. 2 (July 2014): 183–86.
"Princely Modernity: A Mysorean Perspective," Economic and Political Weekly 48, no. 12 (Mar. 23, 2013): 33–36.
Public writing and opinions (selected)
—Union Against Center: The Political Language of Federalism in India,” India in Transition Series, Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI), University of Pennsylvania, February 27, 2023. (Republished in The Wire, The News Minute, and Scroll.in, and translated into Hindi, Bangla, and Tamil)
—“Amar Farooqui: A historian’s indelible legacy and lessons to last a lifetime,” Scroll.in, December 19, 2022.
—“How the princely states, used by Britain to consolidate its empire, faded into obscurity,” Scroll.in, November 24, 2022.
—“Archival Futures: The Archive as a Place and the Place of the Archive,” Los Angeles Review of Books, July 16, 2021.
—“Is this the right time for India to debate swapping its parliamentary system for a presidential one?” Scroll.in, September 13, 2020.
—“Kashmir and the Forgotten History of India’s Princely States,” The Diplomat, August 4, 2020.
—“Of Genealogy and Land Deeds: Some Thoughts on Family Histories in Kerala,” Ala: A Kerala Studies Blog, June 30, 2020.
—"Old Archival Laws, New Archives." Economic and Political Weekly 48, no.3 (Jan. 19, 2013): 20–22.
—"Archives and Archival Consciousness: A Postcolonial Predicament." Economic and Political Weekly 47, no. 22 (June 2, 2012): 32–34.
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
Early modern Europe, intellectual history of the Italian Renaissance, Renaissance humanism and philosophy, Renaissance reception of classical philosophy, and Italian cultural history
DISSERTATION
Virtue and Vice in the Political World of Renaissance Naples
NEWS
—Contributes to "Tensions in Renaissance Cities" Exhibition
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Twentieth-century US history; women and gender; lesbian and gay history; race and ethnicity; mass culture, humor, leisure, and entertainment; consumerism; public history
DISSERTATION
"Take Back the Mic: The Rise of Feminist Stand-Up Comedy in American Culture."
CURRENT POSITION
Curator, Massachusetts Women's History Center (formerly Suffrage100MA)
NEWS
—2020-2022 Hanna Holborn Gray Graduate Student Fellow at the University of Chicago D'Angelo Law Library
—2020-2022 Predoctoral Fellow in Women's History at the National Women's History Museum
—Historians Garner Teaching Prizes
PhD'22 (Modern European history), University of Chicago
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Modern Europe, Modern European Intellectual History, Theories of Modernity and of the West, Modern Germany, Modern Russia, German Idealism, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida and Post-Structuralism, Lebensphilosophie, Philosophies of Consciousness, Philosophies of Language, the Third Reich and the Holocaust, Theories of Democracy, Race in the United States
DISSERTATION
The Dangerous Perhaps: Linguistic Meaning, Political Theory, and the Question of Truth in Twentieth-Century Continental Thought
PUBLICATION
“The Aporetic Humanism of Early Derrida.” Philosophy and Social Criticism 49, no. 7 (2023): 814-838.
PhD '22 (South Asian history), University of Chicago
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Nineteenth- and twentieth-century South Asian history; gender, law, and empire; comparative and transnational histories of gender and sexuality; colonialism, decolonization, and violence; everyday history and history from below; digital and public history.
DISSERTATION
The Scatter of Empire: Prostitution, Law, and Trouble in Colonial India
BIOGRAPHY
Zoya is a historian of gender, law, and empire in modern South Asia. Her current book project Troublemaking in Empire: Prostitution and Women’s Resilience in Colonial India is an expansion of her doctoral dissertation and examines how Indian and European women understood, confronted, and challenged laws relating to sexual commerce in India from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Her work draws on research from governmental and institutional archives across Pakistan and India as well as London and Geneva to argue that legal regimes of policing prostitution were definitively mediated through women’s acts of troublemaking such as confronting law enforcement, hiding from patrols, changing jurisdiction, and crossing borders. By focusing on women’s creativity and chicanery in the face of varying degrees of criminality, her project pivots away from casting them as subject to empire’s legal mandate to exploring what they did to persevere against that mandate.
Sameen’s research interests also include the afterlives of empire, gender history at the intersection of law, technology, and environment, and digitally mapping women’s mobility across borders and regions. In the current academic year, she will be teaching in the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. She completed her PhD in History at the University of Chicago in 2022. She also holds an MA in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago and a BA in History from SOAS, University of London.
NEWS
—Awarded 2021 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship
—Course spotlight on "Prostitution in Global Perspective"
PhD'22 (European history), University of Chicago
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Political economy and the history of capitalism; early modern and modern Europe; the Atlantic World; material culture, consumer societies, and global exchanges; the history of economic thought; labor and social movements; nationalism
DISSERTATION
The Political Economy of Taste: The State and the Porcelain Industry in France, 1682–1815
BIOGRAPHY
Nicholas O’Neill is a historian studying the emergence of capitalism. His research focuses on how capitalist markets are created and how capitalism creates ideas about markets.
Nicholas’s first book project uses the French porcelain industry as a case study on the importance of consumer demand for industrialization. Drawing on institutional economics and material culture studies, his project argues that for a market to emerge operating on a global scope and at an industrial scale, mechanisms had to be invented to reassure consumers about the aesthetic and material qualities of the new goods they encountered. The collective efforts of merchants, manufacturers, and bureaucrats to create, communicate, and control consumer information made possible the transition from commercial to industrial capitalism, generated new conceptions of value and business practices, and made France the world’s leading luxury manufacturer.
Nicholas also studies the history of economic thought from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries with a particular interest in theories of demand and value.
Nicholas O’Neill received his doctorate in history with distinction from the University of Chicago, where he is a Teaching Fellow in History and the College currently teaching the series Power, Identity, and Resistance.
PhD '22 (East Asian history), University of Chicago
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Modern Japan, Disaster Studies, Environmental History, Global Memory Culture, Transnational History, Public History, Emotional History
DISSERTATION
The Earth Still Shakes: A History of Disaster Memorials in Modern Japan
BIOGRAPHY
Alex Jania is a historian of disaster, global memory culture, and modern Japan in the world. Alex’s work sits at the intersection of environmental history, memory studies, and transnational history and seeks to understand how people have used memory practices to make sense of their relationship to past, present, and future environmental hazards. His first book project, Archipelago of Disaster, Archipelago of Memory: Disaster Memorials and History in Modern Japan, explores the history of memorials built in the wake of earthquake and tsunami events in 20th and 21st century Japan, their place in a wider global circulation of memory practice, and their impact as works of public history.
Committed to making the academy more accessible, Alex is an active public historian. Most related to his research, Alex has participated in several memorial organizations dedicated to sharing the memory of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, Tsunami and Fukushima Nuclear Disaster (also known as 3.11) with English-speaking audiences. As a practitioner, in addition to researcher, of disaster memorials, Alex is interested in how the memorial form can be used to address ongoing disasters, like the climate crisis. Currently Alex is developing a memorial to the 1995 Chicago Heat Wave and other victims of heat death in the age of climate change.
Alex received his Ph.D. with distinction in History from the University of Chicago in August 2022. He also holds a M.A. in Interdisciplinary East Asian Studies from The Ohio State University and a B.A. in History from Baylor University.
NEWS
- Course Spotlight: Disastrous Histories
- Alex Jania to Serve as Master of Ceremonies During Kizuna 10: Inochi
- Course Spotlight: Public History Practicum
- Alex Jania on COVIDCalls Episode #337: Disaster Memory in East Asia
- “How Should Americans Remember COVID-19?: Lessons from Post-Disaster Memorials in Japan”
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Modern Japan; Modern China; East Asian Transnational History; Japanese Colonial Empire; Japanese Diaspora; Sino-Japanese Relations; Urban History; History of Shanghai
DISSERTATION
Dissertation: Re-colonizing Shanghai: Japanese Settlement in a Chinese Treaty Port, 1895-1937
NEWS
—Awarded Buchanan Prize by Midwest Conference on Asian Affairs