RESEARCH INTERESTS

Independent Africa; law; military history; crime

BIOGRAPHY

Samuel Fury Childs Daly writes about law, warfare, and the politics of military regimes. Most of his work describes the history of Africa since independence. He asks how soldiers and judges think: how do military dictatorships use law, and how do judiciaries check their powers – or enable them? He also studies what warfare does to legal systems. Armed conflict degrades normative orders, and sometimes it creates new ones. How do people make order and resolve disputes in wartime? His first book, A History of the Republic of Biafra: Law, Crime, and the Nigerian Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2020), connects the Nigerian Civil War to the fraud and violent crime that wracked Nigeria in its wake. Using an original body of legal records from the secessionist Republic of Biafra, it traces how technologies, survival practices, and moral codes that emerged during the fighting lasted long after the war was over. The line between martial violence and violent crime can blur on the battlefield, and once that line is gone it is hard to redraw it.

His forthcoming book, Soldier’s Paradise: Militarism in Africa After Empire, describes one of the twentieth century’s most widespread ideologies – militarism. Across Africa, the late twentieth century was a time of military coups and martial “revolutions.” The men who staged them had utopian visions. In Nigeria and other former British colonies, army officers remade their countries along martial lines. Some soldiers tried to drum colonialism’s bad habits out of people through military-style discipline, or condition civilians to think more like they did. Others believed that making their countries into vast open-air barracks was what would make them truly “free.” They saw judges and lawyers as allies in that mission, but law wasn’t the disciplinary tool they thought it was. Military regimes found that people could turn law back against them, and only some judges shared their world-making aspirations. Soldier’s Paradise shows how law facilitated militarism, and, at times, worked against it. Long submerged by more hopeful ideological currents, militarism is resurfacing in African politics. Soldier’s Paradise describes where it came from.

He is currently conducting research for two projects – a global history of military desertion, and a book about military imposters and role-players. His work has been published in venues including Past & Present, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He holds a PhD in History from Columbia University, an MPhil from the University of Cambridge, and an MA from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He previously taught at Duke University.

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.

Yale University, PhD '98

Princeton University, PhD '18

BIOGRAPHY

Emily Kern is a historian of science, with a specialty in the intellectual and cultural history of anthropology, evolution, and the life sciences. Her research and teaching focus on the relationship between the production of scientific knowledge and the production of global political power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Her current book project, The Cradle of Humanity: Science and the Making of African Origins, explores how the African continent became the “cradle of humankind” and the pre-eminent site for human evolutionary research that it is today. Until the 1950s, it was generally believed that the human species first evolved in Asia, not Africa—an idea that was deeply rooted in European intellectual traditions and continued to draw historians and scientists to the archive, the laboratory, and the Asian field well into the twentieth century. The Cradle of Humanity argues that the story of humanity’s African origin is linked necessarily with the transformation of Africa itself as an object of historical and scientific inquiry. Foregrounding the changing geography of human origins in this history also makes clear that ideas about where humankind emerged often came before explanations for how evolution functioned, and that ideas about place, race, and world history shaped how scientists thought about biological mechanisms and the human species.

Kern is also co-editing the forthcoming volume New Earth Histories with Alison Bashford (UNSW) and Adam Bobbette (Glasgow). Situated at the intersection of the history of the earth
and environmental sciences, New Earth Histories explores the significance of multiple ideas of geological time and cosmological systems for the production of global modernity. She is also beginning work on a second project exploring the contemporary construction of the racial identity of Neanderthals against the long history of the disputed place of Neanderthals in the human evolutionary lineage since the discovery of the first Neanderthal remains in 1856 and the first complete skeletal analysis in 1908.

Kern earned her BA at the University of Pennsylvania and her PhD at Princeton University in 2018. Her dissertation won the 2019 DHST dissertation prize from the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. Before coming to Chicago, she was a postdoctoral research fellow in the New Earth Histories Research Program at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.

Stanford University, PhD '05

BIOGRAPHY

I am a historian of Jewish politics, culture, literature and thought in the modern era and in our own day. Trained in global Jewish history since the 18th century, I teach and lecture on many aspects of the modern Jewish experience, but my scholarship focuses particularly on Jewish political thought and struggle in Eastern Europe in the era of nationalism, on the unfinished history of secular Yiddish and Hebrew literary and cultural creativity, and – currently – on the forces that have shaped the deep conflicts that wrack Jewish life today in Israel and the United States.

Much of my work to date has asked how Jewish visions of cultural and political self-determination were realized, frustrated, unmade, or recast across the 20th century from Russia, Ukraine, and Poland to Palestine and Israel and what happened to Jews in the process.

In 2023, Yale University Press published a volume I co-edited with Israel Bartal, Professor Emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Volume 7 of the Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, National Renaissance and International Horizons, 1880–1918, offers an annotated collection of over 900 primary sources selected to try to encompass every major trend and genre in Jewish cultural production around the globe during the 1880-1918 period. These sources, drawn from nearly twenty languages, are to accompanied by a substantial scholarly apparatus: biographies and bibliographies of each of the authors/artists and a monograph-length introduction which comprises the first attempt I know of to offer a full synthetic account of the global and regional forces, ideological, philosophical, and aesthetic commitments, and political, economic, and cultural conditions that shaped Jewish creative life in this stormy era.

My 2021 book, An Unchosen People: Jewish Political Reckoning in Interwar Poland (Harvard University Press), traces how pre-Holocaust Europe’s largest Jewish community reckoned with nationalism’s pathologies, diaspora’s fragility, Zionism’s promises, and the problem of choice under conditions of powerlessness and danger. An Unchosen People combines intellectual and social history, examining the works of Polish Jewry’s most searching Zionist and Diasporist thinkers as they confronted political irrationality, state crisis, the crisis of culture, and the limits of resistance while also recovering a lost grassroots history of critical thought and political searching among ordinary Jews as they struggled to find a viable future for themselves—in Palestine if not in Poland, individually if not communally. Supported by a Ryskamp Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, An Unchosen People has received the 2022 National Jewish Book Award for History from the Jewish Book Council, the 2022 Oskar Halecki Award for Polish and East Central European History from the Polish Institute for Arts and Sciences in America (PIASA), and honorable mention for the 2022 Kulczycki Book Prize in Polish Studies from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES).

My 2009 Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution (Harvard University Press) examines the triumph and tragedy of bids for Yiddish and Hebrew cultural renaissance amidst total war and revolution. Recovering bold artistic creativity and nation-building undone by violence and repression, Jewish Renaissance demonstrates the intensity of Jewish engagement with the liberal ethos of culture and art as vehicles of freedom, and the surprisingly deep impact of that ethos on Jewish nationalism. Jewish Renaissance received the 2010 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and has now appeared in revised Hebrew translation as Yemei ha-ma’asim: tehiyat ha-tarbut ha-yehudit be-tkufat ha-mahpekhah ha-rusit (Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar, 2023).

Thus, where the first arc of my research asks how Jews participated in a modern dream of freedom and self-determination through art, this second arc investigates how the East European Jewish experience speaks to two other, grimmer global histories: the history of progressive social thought’s ongoing struggle to make sense of the unexpected powers of the politics of hate and fear, and the history of minority confrontations with majority pathologies they cannot change and with the imperatives of communal triage under conditions of powerlessness and danger.

Looking ahead, I am now turning my attention to the post-Holocaust and postwar Jewish world and to the conflicted Jewish life of our own time, with equal interest in the US, Israel and Palestine, and global Jewish itineraries. I am embarked on a study of the American Yiddish poet Arn Glanz-Leyeles, Jewish Americanism, and the fate of Jewish humanism after the Holocaust. I am pursuing research on East European Jewish refugee thought about fascism, religion, and reactionary politics, starting with the writings of Jewish refugees given shelter in wartime Japan.  A project provisionally entitled Israel’s Future: A History will investigate how state and military planners, intellectuals both establishment and anti-establishment, business circles, and now-dominant illiberal nationalist and ethnoreligious parties and thinktanks have approached Israel’s future (as well as the future of the occupied territories and the future – or interminable present – of the Palestinians under occupation) as an object of planning, debate, intervention, power, and critique in ethnopolitical, economic, security, political-theological, environmental, and global-catastrophic idioms.

Finally, I am embarking on a history of the Jewish present – a Jewish history for the 21st century organized not by the horizons and hopes of the 18th and 19th century (above all Enlightenment and Emancipation) but as an effort to better understand the phenomena that are recasting Jewish life today, many of them unexpectedly and in unanticipated ways. These include illiberal ethnonationalist political projects in Israel which are transforming that polity even as we speak; intense forms of religiosity that are not only centered in Israel but also now have a global reach; a multi-faceted gender revolution that now finds women at the center of organized Judaism and the question of gender equality at the heart of some of its fiercest debates; unprecedented forms of ‘post-Jewish’ hybridity in the US and Europe which suggest that much of what Jewish creativity will be and mean in coming decades will fall in an ever-widening space between complete disappearance on the one hand and all forms of organized and committed Judaism on the other; and Jewish participation in – and also new and disturbing roles and representations in – debates about global precarity, inequality, and disaster. An essay on the relations between religion and nationalism both in Judaism and in a comparative vein, written with Roger Friedland, captures some of my lines of thought about the first and second of these dimensions, as does an expanded version of the conclusion to my first book Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution, written in 2022 for the Hebrew translation thereof. 

From 2014 to 2020, I coedited the journal Jewish Social Studies with Tony Michels and Sarah Stein.

In 2021, I co-edited with Benjamin Nathans and Taro Tsurumi From Europe’s East to the Middle East: Israel’s Russian and Polish Lineages (University of Pennsylvania). 

I have also written comprehensive encyclopedia articles on the biography of Y. L. Peretz and the history of Jewish printing and publishing 

And, of course, I’ve written on St. Patrick’s Day celebrations and the construction of Irish American identity.

My work has appeared in Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, Russian, German, and Portuguese. Between 2003 and 2021, I taught Jewish history in the city where Shaul Tshernikhovski's poetry first appeared in print.

Teaching Interests

In addition to introductory courses on modern Jewish history from the 18th century to the present, I have taught specialized seminars on East European Jewry, the history of Palestine and Israel from the Mandate period to the present, Jewish religion and secularity in Eastern Europe and Israel, 20th century Jewish politics and political thought, the history of the Holocaust, Jews and the city, and the history of the idea of Jewish culture. I teach in the Jewish Civ track at the University of Chicago. I have also taught undergraduate courses on 20th century social theory; the history and sociology of nationalism; and the transatlantic history of racial and national minorityhood 1880-1939 (with Michael Hanchard). At the graduate level, I teach modern Jewish historiography and have taught specialized seminars on modern Jewish politics; Mandate Palestine; histories of nationalism; the institution of culture; and theories and histories of secularism and religion in modernity and the present.

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 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.