PhD'22 (South Asian history), University of Chicago
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Bengal, with a particular focus on the history of philosophy, historiography, and the intellectual history of the British empire
DISSERTATION
The Critical Age: Modern Periodization and Moral Revaluation in Colonial Bengal, 1818-1912
PhD'23 (East Asian history), University of Chicago
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Cultural and social history of late imperial and modern China; gender and sexuality; legal history; masculinity studies; ethnicity and the state; everyday life
DISSERTATION
Women’s Violent Crime and a Crisis of Weak Patriarchy in Late Imperial China
AWARD
2022 Buchanan Prize for Best Graduate Essay, East Asia at the Midwest Conference on Asian Affairs for “What She Had: Property, Work, and the Imperative of Autonomy for Wives in the Qing."
PhD'23 (US History), University of Chicago
RESEARCH INTERESTS
US legal history; history of criminal law; history of crime, policing, and incarceration; history of the social and human sciences
DISSERTATION
Legal Perversions: The Creation of the Sexual Carceral State
PUBLICATIONS
"Preserving Guilt in the 'Age of Psychology': The Curious Career of O. Hobart Mowrer." History of Psychology 20, no. 1 (Feb. 2017): 1–27.
PhD'23 (History of Science), University of Chicago
RESEARCH INTERESTS
History of evolutionary biology; nineteenth-century natural history; public and scientific intersections; deep time and historical consciousness; paleontology and paleobiology; relation between human and biological sciences; history of museums
DISSERTATION
The Aurochs Through Time: A History of Integrating Timescales and Disciplines in the Study of the Ancestral Cow
PhD'23 (US history), University of Chicago
RESEARCH INTERESTS
History of capitalism in the twentieth-century United States; history of ideas; the impact of financialization on US politics, society, and culture
DISSERTATION
Country on Fire: The Virtuous Producer in the Era of Finance Capitalism
PhD'22 (US history), University of Chicago
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Religious history; law and religion; history of childhood and the family; legal history; theories of religion
BIOGRAPHY
Jacob Betz’s research sits at the intersection of law, religion, and the family. His current book project is tentatively titled For the Souls of Children: American Faith and State Support of Religion, 1870-1970, which explores how religious groups harness state power on behalf of their youngest members. He has published articles and book chapters on such topics as immigrant children’s religious practices, Native American religious freedom, and the legality of religious contracts.
He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago, where he held a prize lectureship in the Human Rights Program. While completing his dissertation, he taught at Harvard, UIC, and the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh.
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 (Medieval history), University of Chicago
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Socio-political history of the late medieval Holy Roman Empire; late medieval conflict, violence, and warfare (feuding); history of medieval law; medieval aristocracy; state formation.
DISSERTATION
Wars, Feuds, and Enmities– the Violent State of Late Medieval Germany, 1350-1550
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.