RESEARCH INTERESTS
Cultural history, intellectual history, media and information technologies, advertising, propaganda and political art, Germany, the Soviet Union, capitalism and socialism, gender and sexuality
DISSERTATION
Heralds of Health: Selling Wellness, From Central Europe to the United States, 1890-1950
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Main Field: History of Science
Interests: Early modern England; history of medicine and the body; disability history; gender and sexuality studies
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Twentieth-century Latin America, Perú; agrarian and Indigenous histories; Anthropocene and environmental history.
DISSERTATION
When A World Moves On: Land, Life and Struggle in the Peruvian Andes
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Twentieth-century community formation in Japanese cities among marginalized and minority groups; relationship of these processes to the broader development of 少数民族 (shōsū minzoku, minority) identity and "Japanese" identity in Japan
DISSERTATION
Inter-ethnic Community Interactions and Urban Development in Modern Osaka, 1870-1970
RESEARCH INTERESTS
History of the Soviet Union; 20th Century Central Asia; environmental history; agricultural history; history of science and technology
DISSERTATION
The 'Second' Virgin Lands Campaign: Ecological Imperialism and Livestock-Agriculture on the Kazakh Steppe, 1891-1980
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Longue durée US history; Black and Indigenous studies; settler colonialism and slavery; Louisiana and the Atlantic world; subaltern studies, postcolonialism, and ecocriticism; historical trauma, state violence, and genocide; human rights and the history of the present; critical theory and epistemics; digital and spatial humanities
DISSERTATION
Embodied Violence in the Shatter Zone: Settler Colonialism and Slavery on America’s Third Coast
PUBLICATIONS
Journal Articles
“Kinship & (Be)Longing: Reimagining the Place of Black Life in the Louisiana Colonial Archive,” with Jessica Marie Johnson, Journal of Scholarly Editing (Anticipated Publication, Autumn 2023).
“‘It Has Always Been Customary to Make Slaves of Savages’: The Problem of Indian Slavery in Spanish Louisiana Revisited, 1769-1803,” The William & Mary Quarterly 80, no. 3 (Accepted for publication, Summer 2023).
“A Gendered Frontier: Métissage and Indigenous Enslavement in Eighteenth-Century Basse-Louisiane,” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 56 no. 2 (Winter 2023): 205-212.
Book Chapters
“Bulbancha is Still a Place: Decolonizing the History of the Present,” in Louisiana Creole Peoplehood: Afro-Indigeneity and Community, Black-Indigenous Futures & Speculations Series, Rain Prud’homme-Cranford, Darryl Barthé & Andrew Jolivétte, eds. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2021).
“How Making Space for Indigenous Peoples Changes History,” with Caroline Dodds Pennock, in What is History, Now?, Helen Carr & Suzannah Lipscomb, eds. (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2021).
Book Reviews
“Review of A Kingdom of Water: Adaptation and Survival in the Houma Nation,” by J. Daniel d’Oney, The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association 62, no. 2 (Spring 2021): 225-227.
Digital Exhibits
“Life x Code: Digital Historians Against Enclosure – Electric Marronage and Black Keywords for Louisiana,” with Jessica Marie Johnson (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University, 2020).
“Climates of Inequality – Standing Up on River Road: Black Activism in South Louisiana,” with Mary Niall Mitchell (Newark: Rutgers University, 2019).
Theses & Dissertations
“Entwined Threads of Red and Black: The Hidden History of the Enslavement of Native Americans in Louisiana, 1719-1820” (New Orleans: University of New Orleans, 2019).
NEWS
—Appointed to Academic Advisory Board, Stolen Relations, a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Funded Project, PI: Linford D. Fisher, 2022-2026
—Awarded National Historical Publications and Records Commission Planning Grant, with Jessica Marie Johnson, 2021-2023
—Awarded Pozen Family Human Rights Doctoral Fellowship, 2020-2023
—Elected Board Member, History Graduate Students Association, 2020-2021
—Awarded Mellon Research Grant, American Historical Association, 2021
—Winner of the Best PhD Essay Award, The University of Chicago’s Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, 2021
—Named Research Assistant, The American Historical Review, 2021-2022
—Named Doctoral Fellowship Coordinator, The University of Chicago’s Pozen Family Center for Human Rights, 2021-2022
RESEARCH INTERESTS
US 1900-Present; history of the corporation; legal history; history of capitalism; history of investment funds
BIOGRAPHY
William Birdthistle is a graduate of Harvard Law School, where he served as managing editor of the Harvard Law Review. He received his B.A. summa cum laude in English and psychology from Duke University. He is a citizen of both the Republic of Ireland and the United States and spent eight years living in Marsa el-Brega, Libya, and nine years living in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, before coming to the United States for his undergraduate studies.
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Modern Brazil and Latin America; urban history, Rio de Janeiro; legal history; criminal legislation; history of crime; history of urban policing; slavery and abolition; race and racialization; social and political inequality
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Early Modern Britain and its Empire; Colonial America; Comparative Empires; State Formation; Constitutional and Legal history
DISSERTATION
Corporate Autonomy and the Formation of the English State, 1660-1720