Current Graduate Students
Tariq Omar Ali
Areas of Interest: Ideas concerning the commodity jute, (fibers produced from a plant
cultivated almost exclusively in eastern Bengal). I
focus on how intellectuals, government officials, capitalists, and
politicians in London, Calcutta, Dhaka, and the small rural towns of deltaic
Bengal thought about this commodity, and how their ideas made, maintained and
remade global jute markets.
Edward Baring
Areas of interest: Modern European intellectual history, especially existentialism, phenomenology, and structuralism. Dissertation: The young Derrida and the Origins of Deconstruction.
Angus Burgin
Areas of interest: transatlantic intellectual history since the late nineteenth century; history of economic thought; history of political thought; conservatism; historiography. Dissertation: the intellectual history of American conservatism.
Philip Fileri
Areas of Interest: 20th-Century French and German political thought, particularly as it intersected with
post-World War II international relations and European integration. Dissertation: the turn in French intellectual debates during the 1970’s toward issues of liberalism and how this eventually related to a revival of European integration projects by the early 1980’s.
Sofia Grachova
Areas of Interest: Russian and Soviet history; nationalism as a cultural process;
historicism; visual culture.
Stefan Link
Areas of Interest: intellectual history of capitalism in the
19th and 20th century.
Erik Linstrum
Areas of interest: imperialism, psychology, and print culture
in modern Europe, with an emphasis on Britain and Germany.
Elizabeth More
Areas of Interest: the history of feminist thought and the scientific and social scientific
construction of gender. Dissertation: “In Their Best Interests: Social Scientists, Public
Policy, and the Revaluing of Working Mothers, 1940-2000.”
Ada Palmer
Areas of Interest: the long-durée evolution of ideas from ancient to modern times, focusing on the early modern period, especially the reception of classical philosophy in the Renaissance. Dissertation: the rediscovery of Lucretius' Epicurean didactic poem De Rerum Natura and its impact on the history of science, religion, skepticism, atheism and freethought.
Ward Penfold
Areas of Interest: Points of convergence between philosophical and legal thinking in modern Europe and the United States. Dissertation: sociological jurisprudence, a transatlantic movement in legal theory around the turn of the twentieth century.
Kristin Poling
Areas of interest: the cultural and intellectual history of modern
Germany, with an emphasis on urban development and sociology. Dissertation: Urban walls and the transformation of Germany’s social-topographic imagination.
Meredith Quinn
Areas of Interest: intellectual and cultural history of the Ottoman
Empire, with an emphasis on the early modern period.
Sarah Shortall
Areas of Interest: Modern France, with special interests in Catholic thought, fin-de-siecle literature, and twentieth-century theory.
Mira Siegelberg
Areas of Interest: International thought in Europe and America in the 20th
century, with an emphasis on international law and human rights and the
development of moral theory more generally.
Nico Slate
Areas of Interest: How ideas influenced and were in turn influenced by
transnational social movements between the United States and South
Asia in the twentieth century.
Andrew Spadafora
Areas of Interest: Central European intellectual history of the 19th and early 20th centuries;
history of the social sciences.
Dissertation: the role played by the
distinction between facts and values in the methodological debates over social
science and public law in Central Europe before 1914.
Julia Stephens
Areas of Interest: the intellectual and cultural history of South Asia,
including the relationship between religious reform and colonial law during
nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Michael Tworek
Areas of Interest: Cultural and Intellectual Exchanges between Italy and East-Central Europe; Students, Universities, and Ideas of “Nation” in Early Modern Europe.
Juliet Wagner
Areas of interest: Modern European cultural and intellectual history, especially visual culture. Dissertation: the use of film and photography to document “shell shock” and its symptoms during World War I, with special attention to the medical and intellectual contexts in which a connection between film and mental illness developed, in France, Germany and Britain.
Adina Yoffie
Areas of Interest: Early modern European (especially German and
Dutch) intellectual history, especially the history of
biblical commentary and criticism within the context of sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century universities and scholarship.