Stanford Historian (2024) by Stanford History Department

Stanford Historian

Chair’s Letter

Dear

Warm summer greetings from Lane History Corner! As we continue our pursuits in archives, libraries, and institutions around the world, I am pleased to share with you all the 2024 issue of the Stanford Historian

In the pages that follow, you will read more about our faculty and students’ achievements from the past year. Over 250 projects, library exhibitions, fellowships, and campus-wide collaborations filled our programmatic calendar over the last 12 months, and as we look ahead to the fall quarter, that momentum only seems to be increasing. We hosted conferences touching on topics ranging from global typeface endeavors to the history of technology in Latin America, offered over a dozen new courses throughout the year, and celebrated many successes among our current students as well as our alumni. We conferred six M.A., four Ph.D., and twenty-two B.A. degrees this year, and the 34th edition of our Herodotus journal once again highlights the strong historical writing of our undergraduates. Professors Norman Naimark and Mark Lewis retired this year, and after 20 years of service at Stanford, Maria van Buiten retired from the Department. We have also welcomed three new staff members, Vivian Beebe Sana, Van-Anh Nguyen, and Audrey Gao, to the Main Office.

This summer we have launched a tenure-track faculty search in Modern East European History to address our growing curricular and research needs in response to faculty retirements and current world affairs. In the 2024-25 academic year, we are delighted to welcome Dr. Gili Kliger on a 3-year lecturership, as well as four distinguished visitors: Professors Mario Cams (Kratter Visiting Professor - KU Leuven), Edward Loss (Kratter Visiting Professor - University of Bologna), Gabriel Garnero (Fulbright Scholar - Blas Pascal University), and Valentina Serio (Marie Curie Fellow - University of Venice). You’ll find links to additional reading and information on virtually all of our highlighted stories.

This year we were grateful to receive the support of the Choi-Lam H&S Lecturership in Undergraduate Teaching toward our curricular efforts. If you’d like to support our activities, please review our giving opportunities, follow us on X/Twitter, visit our website, answer our Alumni Questionnaire, and feel free to reach out to us at historyinfo@stanford.edu.

Sincerely,

Caroline Winterer Chair, Department of History

William Robertson Coe Professor of History

Stanford

University

History of Now

The History of 2023

How can we understand the events, ideas, and conflicts that have featured in the news cycle during the past year? The History of 2023 offered the historically informed reflections on last year’s momentous events, providing an opportunity to understand our world in its historic context. Each week featured a different History faculty member speaking on a major news topic of the year, showing what we can learn by approaching it from a historical perspective.

The course was open to all students (newcomers and history veterans alike) who wanted to reflect on the challenges and opportunities of 2023, and who were curious to consider how studying history can offer a deeper and richer understanding of tumultuous times.

Featured speakers included Amir Weiner, Gil-li Vardi, Jennifer Burns, Paula Findlen, Thomas Mullaney, James Campbell, Bob Crews, Mikael Wolfe & Jack Rakove.

By popular demand, The History of 2024 will take place this coming Fall!

2023-2024 Historical Conversations were organized by Professors Nora Barakat & Yumi Moon

Historical Conversations is a quarterly event series where Stanford History Faculty workshop their work-in-progress or recently published books. Occasionally, the sessions are organized around a topic that directly affects public life and are open to the campus community.

November 1, 2023 | Paula Findlen

“Trading at the Edge of Empire: Francesco Carletti’s Global Voyage, 1594-1602”

February 21, 2024 | Anne Twitty

“The Persistence of Unfreedom in the ‘Free’ North”

May 15, 2024 | Caroline Winterer

“How

Events

The Department of History enjoyed tremendous programmatic success over the 20232024 academic year.

From September 26, 2023 through June 16, 2024, we hosted and co-sponsored over 250 academic events - that’s an average of approximately one event per day, seven days a week, straight through! We welcomed dozens of visitors from around the world and collaborated extensively with our campus partners, ranging from Stanford Global Studies to the Hoover Institution to the Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Center for Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity, in order to provide exceptional intellectual opportunities for Stanford affiliates and the broader community.

The Africa Research Workshop, British History Lecture Series, East Asian History Reading Group, Eurasian Empires Workshop, Gender History Workshop, Stanford Environmental and Climate History Workshop, and U.S. History Workshop all returned for another year of erudition. We were also delighted to welcome back the Digital History Lecture Series and European History Workshop, and also to collaborate with three brand new event series: the Mexican and Mexican American Studies Reading Group, the Walter Benjamin Reading Group, and the Slavery and Freedom Workshop, organized by the Stanford Humanities Center. The Western History Lecture Series, hosted by the Lane Center for the American West and organized by Professor Emeritus David Kennedy and Professor Kathryn Olivarius, also returned this year with a number of events. More information on our Events can be found here

It wouldn’t have been another year if we did not host a conference or two - or nine!through the Department. In Fall 2023, Professor Thomas Mullaney hosted both Encode/ Include: How Can Digitally Disadvantaged Languages Thrive? and Face/Interface: Global Type Design and Human-Computer Interaction while Professor Caroline Winterer hosted Knowledge & the Sciences of Improving the Mind. Winter 2024 brought Professors Jessica Riskin and Caroline Winterer together for The Apes & Us: A Century of Representations of Our Closest Relatives, which paired an exhibition in Green Library with a synergistic gathering of scholars. Spring 2024 helped us close the year with five separate colloquia: Professor Destin Jenkins hosted the Debtor Democracy Project, Professor Mikael Wolfe hosted Workshop on History of Latin American Technology, Aesthetics, Design and Craft, Professor Paula Findlen hosted Paper Worlds: Urbano Monte and the Global Renaissance in association with the Rumsey Map Center, Professor Jennifer Burns hosted a miniconference for the Department’s U.S. History graduate students, and a festschrift for Professor Emeritus Richard Roberts was co-sponsored and organized with the Center for African Studies.

With such a wide array of events, I count myself fortunate to be the staff member who gets to have a hand in helping all of them come to fruition. They’re informative, thoughtful, congenial and entertaining, and I’m already looking forward to Fall 2024!

We hope you can join us soon, and if you’re around for the return of our bi-weekly History Monday gathering, lunch is on me!

Colin Hamill Events & Communications Coordinator

Dan Rodgers

Visiting Professor

Princeton University

Katie Gaddini

Visiting Scholar

University College London

Manuel Kamenzin

Visiting Research Fellow

Ruhr University Bochum

Freya Schwachenwald

Krupp Foundation Fellow

Technische Universität Berlin

Giorgio Riello

Kratter Visiting Professor University of Warwick

Ewa Domanska

Visiting Professor Adam Mickiewicz University

Catherine Rosbrook

Visiting Student Researcher University of Ghent

Silvia Sebastiani

Kratter Visiting Professor

École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales

Pierre France

Visiting Student Researcher Aix-Marseille University

Jasmine Benhaida

Visiting Student Researcher University of Basel

Sabelo Mlangeni | Denning Visiting Artist

Sabelo Mlangeni is a contemporary South African photographer who has built his practice around intimate photographs that draw out the inherent beauty in the ordinary. His most recent exhibition, Imvuselelo: The revival, was at the Cantor Arts Center from September 27, 2023 to January 21, 2024.

During his residency at Stanford, hosted by the History Department in collaboration with the Center for African Studies with funding from the Stanford Visiting Artist Fund in Honor of Roberta Bowman Denning, Mlangeni collaborated with Professor Joel Cabrita for a Photography Network symposium and the African Studies Association Conference. On numerous occasions, he also talked to students and public audiences about his artistic practice of capturing the complex cultural identities in contemporary South African society.

Imvuselelo: The revival

Exploring San Francisco’s Black Churches (Stanford Report)

Photographing South African communities and identities (Stanford Daily)

Sabelo Mlangeni: Looking

Faculty Profile: Anne Twitty

Professor Anne Twitty joined the Department of History in August 2023 as Associate Professor. Her work explores American legal and public history. She is the author of ‘Before Dred Scott: Slavery and Legal Culture in the American Confluence, 1787-1857’ (Cambridge University Press, 2016).

How did you become interested in 19th century American history?

As morbid as it sounds, I always loved going to old cemeteries with my paternal grandmother as a child, and when you’re from the American Midwest, “old” means the nineteenth century. Headstones only contain a handful of details but can inspire so many questions. They beg us to ask about the lives and deaths of those whose names they bear - about the ravages of war and disease, about staggering maternal and childhood mortality rates, about social class and an individual’s place in the center or on the margins of a family or community, and about so much else. Cemeteries in general, meanwhile, are just as suggestive about a given locality. Who was buried in this place - and who was excluded? Whose graves are even marked? How did a place change demographically over time? Trying to understand the experiences of ordinary Americans and their communities has been a source of fascination ever since.

What texts inspired you the most in your career? Why?

In the fall of my senior year of college, I read Christine Stansell’s City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 - a book I’ll be reading again this fall with students enrolled in my seminar on Antebellum America. City of Women is a beautifully written social history of white working women in New York City in the first half of the nineteenth century. It is an unflinching account of the brutality and drudgery that defined so much of their lives, but also the often-thrilling possibilities urban life presented for erstwhile farm girls and housewives. For me, though, the central contribution of City of Women may well be the skill with which it renders those who populate its pages. It treats historical actors with deep empathy. And while its primary focus is a much-degraded group, it nevertheless takes seriously the choices they could and did make.

Your book draws on an untapped collection of nearly 300 hundred freedom suits filed in a region defined by fluid boundaries and legal ambiguity. How did you come across this collection?

Ironically, my admiration for City of Women led, in a roundabout way, to my discovery of the remarkable collection of freedom suits I wrote about in my first book,

Before Dred Scott: Slavery and Legal Culture in the American Confluence, 1787–1857. After reading Stansell’s book, I subsequently applied to work with her on a PhD at Princeton. For a project in her graduate course on Metropolitan Life, she encouraged me to work with a set of recently digitized lawsuits that originated in the St. Louis circuit court. Once I started reading these so-called freedom suits - legal proceedings initiated by enslaved people who asserted that they were entitled to their freedom - I was hooked. Freedom suits provide an incredible window into the lived experience of slavery and the ways ordinary Americans used formal law to advance their own interests.

Which topics will you be teaching at Stanford?

I hope to be able to teach broadly in American history, including courses that explore the rise and fall of American slavery, legal history, and history of gender and sexuality. As someone who has been actively engaged in conversations surrounding the removal of Confederate monuments and the history of slavery on university campuses, moreover, I would also like to teach about historical memory, especially as it relates to campus settings.

You are a prolific public historian. What are some opportunities and challenges of conducting public history during the 21st century?

Among the American public, I think there is currently a widespread interest in a whole host of historical questions that professional historians - whether they’re found in the classroom, at historic sites, in virtual arenas, or elsewhereare poised to answer. Often these historical questions revolve around difficult episodes in our past that can be challenging and unpredictable to navigate. But we have an obligation to confront them patiently, directly, and honestly - and in all their complexity. That may sound easy, but it can be really hard in practice.

Stanford School of Humanities & Sciences SEED Grants

Robert Crews & Mejgan Massoumi | The Sonic Resistance Archive: Music, Poetry, and Memory in Afghanistan

Caroline Winterer & Jessica Riskin | The Apes & Us: A Century of Thinking about Humans among the Primates

Richard Lounsbery Foundation

Gabrielle Hecht | The Science and Experience of Air Pollution in Africa

France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies

Thomas Mullaney | Oriental Impressions: Printing Oriental Languages between West and East, 16th-19th centuries

Gabrielle Hecht | African Airs: Living with Air Pollution in Cote D’Ivoire

Rachel Jean-Baptiste | Roots and Routes: Belonging and Citizenship of Metis in France, Senegal, Benin, and Mali

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

Destin Jenkins | Improving democratic decision making in municipal finance to further progress toward equity

Rome Archive Seminar | Vivian Beebe Sana

Since 2018, Professor Paula Findlen has been co-leading the Rome Archive Seminar, an annual graduate student training, in collaboration with faculty from Princeton University and the University of Notre Dame. The month-long seminar brings together graduate students across the United States to the University of Notre Dame’s gateway campus in Rome. Each year a cohort of ten graduate students attend the program. Professor Findlen describes the program as follows

The Rome Seminar gives graduate students a structured opportunity to focus on the nature of research itself before they embark on a dissertation. Essentially, we’re offering the seminar we would have loved to have as graduate students!

The seminar emphasizes the value of knowing the history of a repository to understand why things ended up there as well as how this material is organized and reorganized over many centuries. We also want to show students why it’s important to talk with librarians and archivists. They know things that catalogues alone can’t tell you. Last but hardly least, getting comfortable having scholarly conversations in Italian, or any foreign language, is a learned skill. You need to practice!

Faculty in Stanford News

Learning the history of evolution and primatology by Melissa De Witte

80,000-plus characters, one keyboard: China’s fight to join the digital age by Cameron Scott

How waste from the mining industry has perpetuated apartheid-like policies in South Africa by Melissa De Witte

Philip Morris made cigarettes at Auschwitz in the 1990s by Cameron Scott

Faculty Highlights

Professor Barakat

H&S Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching -

Professor Gordon Chang

Elected to American Academy of Arts & Sciences -

Professor Joel Cabrita

Written Out: The Silencing of Regina Gelana Twala

National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences Best Non-Fiction Biography

Professor Gabrielle Hecht

Residual Governance: How South Africa Foretells Planetary Futures

Association of American Publishers’ PROSE Awards in Government and Politics & Excellence in Social Sciences

Professor Rachel Jean-Baptiste, Multiracial Identities in Colonial French Africa: Race, Childhood, and Citizenship

David H. Pinkney Prize -

Professor Steven Zipperstein

Elected to American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Professor Rowan Dorin’s first book, No Return: Jews, Christian Usurers, and the Spread of Mass Expulsion in Medieval Europe, received numerous accolades this year:

• American Historical Association Pacific Coast Branch Book Award

• American Academy for Jewish Research Salo Baron Book Prize

• Canadian Historical Association Wallace K. Ferguson Prize

• Canadian Society of Medievalists Margaret Wade Labarge Prize

Professor Emeritus Peter Stansky

The Orwell Society

Peter Davison Award

Professor Emeritus Clayborn Carson

National Civil Rights Museum 2023 Freedom Award

Professor Emeritus Albert Camarillo

Western History Association

Honorary Lifetime Membership

Professor Kathryn Olivarius’ first book, Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom, received numerous accolades this year:

• Southern Historical Association Francis B. Simkins Award

• American History Association Prize in American History

• Society for Historians of the Early American Republic James H. Broussard Best First Book Prize

• Association of American Publishers’ PROSE Awards in North American and U.S. History & Excellence in Humanities

• American Historical Association Pacific Coast Branch Book Award

• Louisiana Library Association Louisiana Literary Award

Professor Olivarius was also awarded the 2024

Retirements

Professor Norman Naimark

Robert & Florence McDonnell Professor of East European Studies; Professor, by courtesy, of German Studies; Senior Fellow, by courtesy, at the Hoover Institution

Professor Mark Lewis

Kwoh-Ting Li Professor in Chinese Culture; Professor, by courtesy, of Religious Studies

Dan David Prize

New Books on the Bookshelf

Asian American Research Center at Stanford (AARCS)

After decades of advocacy from faculty, alumni, and students, the university has launched the Asian American Research Center at Stanford (AARCS) to connect and expand interdisciplinary research on Asian American issues occurring across campus. Housed in the School of Humanities and Sciences, the new center will provide a research home for faculty, students, and the public and support and expand Stanford’s scholarship on Asian Americans. Professor Gordon Chang will serve as the center’s inaugural director starting in fall 2024.

Read the full article from Cameron Scott

We talked with Dr. Theresa Iker (Choi-Lam H&S Lecturer in Undergraduate Teaching) who taught HISTORY 262A: Taylor Swift and Millennial America in Winter 2024.

“Taylor Swift is so visible now because she is in the midst of her global Eras tour, which has generated over two billion dollars in North American ticket sales alone. But the real answer, as historians know, is always more complicated. ... The course begins in 1989, Swift’s birth year, the end (or at least the beginning of the end) of the Cold War and a period of stability and optimism in the United States. It was also a moment of “Girl Power” feminism that encouraged female self-expression and artistry, particularly in growing digital spaces.”

Read the full interview here

Cecil H. Green Library 2023-2024 Exhibitions

Embodied Knowledge: Women and Science Before Silicon Valley

August 11, 2023 - March 24, 2024

Undergraduate Spotlight Honors Theses Summer Internships

Lucy Sandeen

Baird Johnson Supreme Court of the United States Washington, DC

Lily Forman

Vabamu Museum of Occupations and Freedom Tallinn, Estonia

Jessica Susanto White House Visitors Office Washington, DC

Diego Galvez Improve Your Tomorrow Sacramento, CA

Undergraduate Awards

Oluwatobi Bankole Stanford Award of Excellence

Sophie Callcott Elected to Phi Beta Kappa

Nilou Davis

Hoefer Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Writing

Jerry Anderson Prize for Best History Undergraduate Research Paper

Luke Lamberti

Oral Communication Award for Excellence in Honors Thesis Presentation Francisco Lopes Prize in the Humanities

Baird Johnson

David M. Kennedy Prize

Robert M. Golden Medal for Excellence in Humanities and Creative Arts

Elected to Phi Beta Kappa

Noah Sveiven

James Birdsall Weter Prize for Outstanding History Honors Thesis

Yusuf Zahurullah Stanford Award of Excellence

In Monuments and Minds: The Martinsburg, West Virginia Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy

Jane Belcaster “Coretta’s” Narrative: Shaping the Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Ethan Strombeck

Fever Dreams: Chilean Migration and the Making of Gold Rush California

Baird Johnson

Perpetuating the Union: The Struggle for American Federalism

Kene Nzelu

The Hair Icon:

How Diana Ross’s Hairstyles Demonstrate Shifts in Perce ptions of Black Women’s Hair, 1960-1980

Eric Areklett

Preserving Sovereignty and the Union: The Federalist Understanding of the Constitution

Mark Huerta

American Engagement with Yugoslavia: Hardening Bipolarism and Building a Legend

Luke Lamberti

Leaven in the Lump: The American Friends Service Committee Criminal Justice Program, 1971-1978

Yusuf Zahurullah Automated Separation: Internal American Muslim Dynamics in Detroit from the 19102 through the 1980s

Sophie Callcott

“She Took of the Fruit Thereof and She Did Eat”: Representations of the Female Saintly Body in Tenth-Century Byzantine Hagiography

Noah Sveiven

Model Humans: Interpreting Apes, Creating Data, 1960-1979

Undergraduate Research Mentorship Program

Arbitrating Race

Faculty Mentor: Pedro Regalado

Undergraduate RA: Maya Martinez-Krams

Gender and the First Black Republic:

Women in the History of Haiti

Faculty Mentor: Rachel Jean-Baptiste

Undergraduate RA: Michelle Kalu

Muslims in the Catholic Imagination: Islam and Popular Culture in Ireland and Mexico

Faculty Mentor: Robert Crews

Undergraduate RA: Samiya Rana

Undergraduate RA: Arynn Carty

Photography and Religion in Southern Africa

Faculty Mentor: Joel Cabrita

Undergraduate RA: Zoe Edelman

Urbano Monte’s 1587 World Map: A Rumsey Map Center Exhibit and Website

Faculty Mentor: Paula Findlen

Undergraduate RA: Anna Moller

Read more about the Undergraduate Research Mentorship Program

2023-2024

Peer Advisors

Baird Johnson

Novia Liu

Anna Moller

Ethan Strombeck

Jessica Susanto

Herodotus Undergraduate Journal

Kevin Khadavi

The Caged Bird Sings: A Source Analysis of the 701 BCE Assyrian Failure to Capture Jerusalem

Lindsay Wu

Japan’s Choice of a Southern Strategy in World War II: American Deterrence, the China Problem, and the Oil Imperative

Becca De Los Santos

Inversion of the Top-Down Operation: Enslaved Voices and French Abolitionism in 1840s Senegal

Ines Salter Martin

Unveiling Gisela: Reconsidering the Life and Myths of Charlemagne’s Sister

Arvind Asokan

Nixon, Kissinger, and the Bangladesh Genocide: Balancing Diplomatic Priorities against Moral Considerations

Felipe Jafet

The American Civil War and Reconstruction Through the Eyes of Brazil: A Model

Eric Areklett

Pillars of the Revolution: Union, Liberty, and Popular Sovereignty Debated during Ratification

Anna Pikarska

Blind Fighting: Totalitarianism and the Dehumanization of Warfare

Read Volume XXXIV of Herodotus here

Graduate Showcase

Aliyah Dunn-Salahuddin 2024 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship

PhD Candidate Aliyah Dunn-Salahuddin receives 2024 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. The program supports doctoral students in the humanities and interpretive social sciences as they pursue bold and innovative approaches to dissertation research.

Dunn-Salahuddin has been recognized as one of 45 awardees, selected from a pool of more than 700 applicants through a rigorous, interdisciplinary peer review process. Dunn-Salahuddin’s research explores a history of the Black freedom struggle in San Francisco filtered through the lens of environment, race, and infrastructure. Primarily focusing on the Bayview-Hunters Point community of the 1960s and 1970s, the project emphasizes: 1) the production of urban black space in relation to gender and Black political ideology; 2) the development of US nuclear capabilities in San Francisco and issues of environmental justice; 3) the relationship between Black environmentalism and civil rights in Northern California. At its core, this project is an urban black history of post-WWII America that traces the spatial, material, and social conditions of African Americans in San Francisco’s Bayview Hunters Point. Utilizing oral history, community engagement, and original dance film shorts, this project reveals the ways that African Americans informed and shaped their environments, as well as the institutions and systems that governed their lives.

Tanner Allread

Western History Association Indian Student Conference Scholarship

Lane Baker

Viator Andy Kelly Prize

The Sound of Sin: Episcopal Noise Regulation in the Later Middle Ages

Sites of Memory and Recovery: A Black San Francisco Story in Dance was featured in the 2023 San Francisco Dance Film Festival. PhD candidate Aliyah Dunn-Salahuddin created the film as part of the History 304A: Reimagining History course taught by Professor James Daughton and with funding from the History Department.

More about the film

2024-2025 Incoming History Graduate Students

How We Talk About the Past: Slavery and Memory on a Presidential Plantation

Emily Bradley Greenfield 2023-24 Mellon Foundation Dissertation Fellow

“My dissertation reconstructs the public history of Monticello, the Virginia plantation of President Thomas Jefferson. Since opening as a “national shrine” in 1923, the site has welcomed millions of visitors. In fact, the Monticello pilgrimage has its roots in the early nineteenth century. For two hundred years, people have been journeying to Jefferson’s “little mountain” – invited and uninvited; by carriage, train, and station wagon; on nineteenth-century travelogue tours and twentieth-century field trips. I seek to understand the magnetism of this archetypal presidential plantation, its role in shaping a larger American history of heritage tourism, and the messages and meanings it has projected to a visiting public over time. In particular, I am interested in the ways that slavery has been remembered and forgotten at Monticello and peer sites.”

Read the full interview with Emily here

Environment, Religion, and Social Change in French West Africa, 1850–1960

Wallace Teska

2023-24 Mellon Foundation

Dissertation Fellow

“My project began with a contemporary observation. Before I began my Ph.D. at Stanford, I served as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching English in Benin, West Africa. I came to Benin straight off a job at an international law firm in New York, and questions about law were very much on my mind. To my surprise at the time, my friends and neighbors in Benin seldom thought about law as something dominated by state institutions. Marriages, divorces, inheritances, and child custody disputes often existed entirely outside the “formal” court system.”

Read the full interview with Wallace here

2024-2025 SHC Dissertation Fellows

Austin Clements ~ Jon Cooper ~ Emily Bradley Greenfield Chepchirchir Tirop ~ Morgan Tufan

AFRICA

Selam Kidane

BRITAIN

Isabel Shahani

Gillian Smith

EARLY MODERN EUROPE

Alara Aygen

Oluwatobi Bankole

Benjamin Harris

Yoav Levinson-Sela

EAST ASIA

Xincheng Hou

Anthony Tong

HISTORY OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT & MEDICINE

Fyza Parviz Jazra

JEWISH HISTORY

Daniela Goodman Rabner

MEDIEVAL

Eric Lindheim-Marx

James Terrasi

MODERN EUROPE

Eva Baudler

Haoze Zhou

SOUTH ASIA

Shifa Nouman

TRANSNATIONAL, INTERNATIONAL & GLOBAL HISTORY

Kayra Guven

UNITED STATES

Jackson Huston

Sarah Lerner

Matthew Levine

Bailey Martin

Ayesha Pasha

Micaela Wibberly

Commencement 2024

Sunday, June 16, 2024

MAJORS & MINORS

Eric Areklett (Honors) ~ Tobi Bankole ~ Diana Baszucki ~ Jane Belcaster (Honors) ~ Anne Boyle ~ Sophie Callcott (Honors)

Mark Huerta (Honors) ~ Baird Johnson (Honors) ~ Rhea Kale ~ Luke Lamberti (Honors) ~ Diego Leibman

Kene Nzelu (Honors) ~ Sabian Polanco ~ Lucy Sandeen (Honors) ~ Brian Shortt ~ Adam Smith ~ Johann Smith

Jacob Soliman ~ Ethan Strombeck (Honors) ~ Peak Suthisamphat ~ Noah Sveiven (Honors) ~ Yusuf Zahurullah (Honors)

Thomas Adams ~ Krista Arenaodu ~ Hannah Basali ~ Bryan Benitez ~ Noa Bregman ~ Catarina Buchatskiy

Aidan Chandra ~ Colby Clark ~ Becca De Los Santos ~ Iris Fu ~ Raghav Ganesh ~ William Hofgard ~ Arjun Karanam

Benjamin Korngiebel ~ Elizabeth Krolicki ~ Grace Li ~ Jaime Mizrachi ~ Michael Pascal ~ William Seymour

Stefan Velculescu ~ Tessa Wayne ~ Emily Wesel ~ Mattheus Wolff

M.A. GRADUATES

Eva Baudler ~ Zachary Cherian ~ Andrew Richard Matejka ~ Stephanie Smith ~ Kavya Srikanth ~ Haoze Zhou

Ph.D. GRADUATES

Austin Steelman

Paper Gods: The Bible, the Constitution, and the Evangelical Revolt Against Modernity, 1923-1986

Advisor: Professor Jennifer Burns

Wallace Teska

Paths to Justice: Environment, Religion, and Social Change in French West Africa, 1850-1960

Advisors: Professor Joel Cabrita & Emerit Professor Richard Roberts

Charlotte Thun-Hohenstein

Running Towards Eternity: Jeremias Drexel, S.J. (1581–1638) and Spiritual Authorship in Seventeenth-Century Europe

Advisor: Professor Paula Findlen

Carolyn Zola

Public Women: Urban Provisioners in Nineteenth Century America

Advisor: Emerit Professor Estelle Freedman

“And here I turn to our graduates. You chose to be the keepers of time: of our coherence and continuity. You chose to find and restitch the infinite number of unspoken, implicit links we take for granted in our day to day lives—as many as you can, at least—in graduation cards and beyond. And then you turn what you find into stories, constrained by evidence, so that the rest of us can enjoy continuity, not just in the here and now, but across time.”

Professor Thomas S. Mullaney Commencement 2024 Opening Remarks

“As all of us have encountered over and over again, very specific moments are almost always very complicated. To the extent that there are general truths, realities, or trends, they are made up of particulars. As a discipline, history is uniquely equipped to access these details and the towering edifice they can become. By championing the narrow over the general; the moment over the trend; the data over the model; the investigation over the theory; we can better see them all. Among the humanities and the social sciences — and perhaps this is not an unbiased perspective — history is best able to reckon with and make sense of a world which is at all times and in all places almost unimaginably complex.”

Baird Johnson Commencement 2024 Undergraduate Speech

The opportunity to revise is a precious part of life on this planet, if we are lucky: the chance to learn, to rethink, to get closer to the thing that might be the truth. To see the world with a little more clarity. We might not always understand the assignment, as I clearly had not. But perhaps we can find things that move us, and in time, to celebrate being wrong.

Dr. Carolyn Zola Commencement 2024 Graduate Speech

Travel the World with Stanford Historians

2024

September 4-12 | Mexico City and Oaxaca

Ana Raquel Minian

September 7-18 | Brittany

Carolyn Lougee Chappell

October 8-18 | Sicily

Caroline Winterer

October 18-29 | The Balkans: Venice to Istanbul

Norman Naimark & Katherine Jolluck

For more information on these Stanford Travel/Study trips led by History faculty, click here

2025

May 5-20 | Rhine, Man, Danube

Norman Naimark

May 12-18 | Paris - Bal de l’X

Carolyn Lougee Chappell

June 17-26 | Britain, France, Belgium

David Kennedy

September 10-17 | New England

Caroline Winterer

September 21 - October 10 | Central Asia

Bob Crews

October 14 - 31 | Melanesia

Norman Naimark & Katherine Jolluck

November 8-20 | Japan

Kären Wigen

Digital Humanities

Audrey Gao | SILICON Project Coordinator

“Linguists predict that 50% or more of the world’s languages may become extinct this century. Meanwhile, out of the approximately 7,000 living human languages, all but 100–or roughly 98%–are categorized as “Digitally Disadvantaged Languages” (DDLs) by the Unicode Consortium, the non-profit agency committed to ensuring that all human writing systems can be represented digitally across technical platforms. SILICON, the Stanford Initiative on Language Inclusion and Conservation in Old and New Media, works to preserve Digitally Disadvantaged Languages (DDLs.)”

I joined the project in Spring 2024. As Project Coordinator, I work closely with three project PIs in managing our research and outreach initiatives. I also liaise with UNICODE and other language preservation organizations in running the inaugural practitioner and student internship programs. For more information about our activities, please visit the SILICON website.

Anne Ladyem McDivitt | Academic Technology Specialist

“One of the biggest projects I’ve been involved with this year is SILICON (Stanford Initiative on Language Inclusion and Conservation in Old and New Media). Tom Mullaney is one of the three PIs on the project, and we’ve had a busy year with getting the project started. In the past year, we’ve hired Audrey Gao as our project manager, started an internship program, accepted applications for a practitioner program, and launched a new website.

I also taught another iteration of my class “Crafting Digital Stories” in the Spring Quarter, as well as workshops for the department on Zotero and Twine throughout the academic year. We also had a graduate student DH lunch, which I am hoping to repeat in the next academic year. I’ve been working on ideas for next academic year and more workshops and events I can offer for everyone in the Department of History.”

Giovanna Ceserani | A World Made by Travel: The Digital Grand Tour

This digital publication transforms the foundational Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy, 1701–1800 (compiled from the Brinsley Ford Archive by John Ingamells) into an interactive and datarich interface. It introduces more than a thousand new figures, including hundreds of women, servants, workers, and Italians not previously represented among the Dictionary’s primary headings.

Thomas S. Mullaney | The Chinese Deathscape

In this digital volume, three historians of China, Jeffrey Snyder-Reinke, Christian Henriot, and Thomas S. Mullaney, chart out the history of China’s rapidly shifting deathscape. Each essay grapples with a different dimension of grave relocation and burial reform in China over the past three centuries: from the phenomenon of “baby towers” in the Lower Yangzi region of late imperial China, to the histories of death in the city of Shanghai, and finally to the history of grave relocation during the contemporary period, examined by Mullaney, when both its scale and tempo increased dramatically.

Caroline Winterer | What America’s Founders Learned from Antiquity

What America’s Founders Learned from Antiquity reveals the influences of the ancient world on the American founders. In 24 lectures, taught by Professor Caroline Winterer, you’ll explore the thought and actions of the American revolutionaries to see how classical antiquity shaped every aspect of the revolutionary and founding era. You’ll better understand why it was natural for American revolutionary thinkers to turn to classicism to make sense of their growing disunity with the British, and to envision and forge a new kind of government.

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Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State

Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky (PhD, ’18)

Making Mao’s Steelworks: Industrial Manchuria and the Transnational Origins of Chinese Socialism

Koji Hirata (PhD, ’18)

Mejgan Massoumi (PhD, ’21) Western History Association Dissertation Prize

Arman Kassam (’22) Gates Cambridge Scholarship