PRINCETON - Key Persons
Aaron Stamper is a religious and cultural historian specializing in late medieval and early modern Iberia, Mediterranean, and Europe. His interdisciplinary background and interests in interreligious relations, ethnicity, race, and gender have led him to explore methods from sensory studies and apply them in his work. In May 2023, he defended his dissertation - a sensory history of Granada, Spain from the 15 th- 17 th centuries - and received his PhD under the direction of Anthony Grafton. Aaron also holds a dual MA in History and Religious Studies from the University of Colorado, Boulder, as well as a dual BA in Spanish and Religious Studies from the University of New Mexico. His work has been supported by the U.S. Fulbright Research Award, the Charlotte W. Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship, and the Princeton University Center for Culture, Society, and Religion.
Currently, Aaron is transforming his dissertation, "Reconfigured and Remade: A Sensory History of Islamic Granada's Reformation as a Civitas Christiana, 1474-1614," into a monograph. His project shows how Catholic efforts to convert Granadans and restructure the city's built environment embodied their greater ambition to establish a civitas christiana - the New Jerusalem and ideal Christian community on Earth. His work is also about resistance to those transformations - distinct reactions from one person to the next, and all within the changing sensorial landscape of an increasingly Catholic city. He foregrounds the stories of Granada's marginalized to provide a comprehensive understanding of religious practice and conversion, of political activism and resistance, and of the ways in which perceptions of gender, racial, and ethnic differences came together in the west.
His recent publication in The Sixteenth Century Journal, "Melodies of Doves, Clamor from the Towers: The Dawn of Granada's Sonic Conversion," explores of the shifting soundscape of Granada, Spain, following the Catholic conquest of 1492. He has also collaborated with Granada's Department of the National Organization of Spanish Blind People (ONCE) to edit, present, and publish an article based from archival documents on the blind community of 16 th-century Granada. He has published an online story-map article for The Spain-North Africa Project, which allows readers to follow the travels of a Spanish-Christian soldier and a Spanish-Muslim diplomat through the 16 th- and 17 th-century Mediterranean.
Before attending Princeton, Aaron held multiple graduate and teaching assistant positions at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and worked as a Teaching Auxiliar for the Spanish Ministry of Education. At Princeton, he served as Co-Organizer of Princeton University's Race Before Modernity Book Club, as a Teaching Fellow for the Princeton Global History Lab in collaboration with La Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero (UNTREF) in Buenos Aires, and taught as an Assistant in Instruction for the Department of History. He is currently a Lecturer for Princeton's History Department.
Job Titles:
- Librarian for History, History of Science, and African Studies
Alice McCrum is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Department of History with broad and burgeoning interests in environmental history as it relates to law and empire.
Before starting her graduate work, Alice lived in Paris, where she taught at the Sorbonne, directed cultural programming at the American Library in Paris, and hosted a podcast at Shakespeare & Company Bookstore.
Alice holds a B.A. in history and English from Columbia University and a M.P.P. in environmental policy from Sciences Po-Paris.
Job Titles:
- Co - Producer of Harlan B. Joseph Was Here
- Founding Co - Director of the Princeton - Mellon Initiative
- Member of Committee
- Professor
Professor Isenberg served two years as president of the Society for American City and Regional Planning History, a multidisciplinary organization bringing together scholars and practitioners from history, design and planning, American studies, geography, environmental history, art history, sociology, preservation, and policy. Isenberg has worked on the boards of the Urban History Association and H-Urban, and was founding review editor for the Journal of Planning History. She currently serves on the Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society, Hagley Museum & Library Advisory Committee.
Before moving to Princeton in 2010, Isenberg taught at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey (2001-2010), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1997-2001) and Florida International University (1994-1997). Her scholarship has been supported by visiting fellowships at the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture (Spring 2010), the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University (2006-7), the Institute for the Arts & Humanities at the University of North Carolina (Fall 2000), and the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe (1998-9). Shorter-term fellowships from the Graham Foundation, James Marston Fitch Foundation, Hagley Museum and Library, Rockefeller Archive Center, Winterthur Library, and the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation have provided generous research resources. Before pursuing a Ph.D., Isenberg worked in affordable housing, parks planning, and historic preservation in New York City.
Isenberg is co-producer of Harlan B. Joseph Was Here, a documentary film about the Trenton Uprisings story, directed by Purcell Carson. Anticipated 2023 release.
Andrew Hoyt is a first-year PhD student with interests spanning the histories of the life and environmental sciences, US environmental and political history, and North American Indigenous history. His research currently focuses on the political dimensions of ecology and other forms of environmental expertise in the United States. Working across political scales, he seeks to characterize the influence of environmental knowledge and knowledge-holders on both major trends in American environmental governance and specific federal, state, and tribal management contexts.
Andrew has written on such topics as the politics of Ojibwe resource management, the development of the field of resource economics, and the relationship between plant-ecological concepts and conservation practices in the United States. His MA thesis, "Ecology, Settler Colonialism, and the Environments of the American Midwest: The Science and Politics of Ecological Restoration since 1950" examines the emergence of ecological restoration as a concept, research agenda, and set of practices since the mid-twentieth century. The thesis demonstrates that, as the logic of restoration has come to dominate environmental management in the Midwest, restoration practices have shaped public agencies and settler-Indigenous relations as well as material environmental conditions in the region.
Before starting at Princeton, Andrew graduated magna cum laude from Carleton College with a B.A. in History and a background in ecological research. He went on to work as an energy analyst and climate policy advocate in Minneapolis for several years before completing an M.A. in History at Trent University in Ontario.
Job Titles:
- Chairman
- Member of the Executive Committee
- Ex Officio
- Member of Committee
- of Science
- Thomas M. Siebel Professor in the History of Science
Angela Creager studies the history of 20th-century biomedical research. Professor Creager graduated from Rice University with a double major in biochemistry and English (1985) and completed a Ph.D. in biochemistry (1991) at the University of California, Berkeley, where she developed an interest in the history of biology. Supported by postdoctoral awards, she retrained as a historian of science at Harvard University and MIT, and joined the Princeton History Department in 1994. Her first book, The Life of a Virus: Tobacco Mosaic Virus as an Experimental Model, 1930-1965 (2002), shows how a virus that attacks tobacco plants came to play a central role in the development of virology and molecular biology. Her second book, Life Atomic: A History of Radioisotopes in Science and Medicine (2013), traces how and why artificial radioisotopes were taken up by biologists and physicians, and examines the consequences for knowledge and radiation exposure. In 2022, she and six coauthors published Residues: Thinking Through Chemical Environments, which considers the environmental impacts of chemicals production, consumption, disposal, and regulation. She is also the coeditor of four volumes, most recently Risk on the Table: Food Production, Health, and the Environment (2021), with Jean-Paul Gaudillière.
Anin Luo is an intellectual historian interested in the intersection of science and politics. Her research lies between the history and philosophy of the life and medical sciences, legal and international history, and environmental history. She specializes in twentieth-century Europe and maintains research interests in twentieth-century China.
Her research seeks to historicize the relationship between politics and understandings of human life. Her dissertation is a postwar international history of immunity: drawing on scientific, medical, legal, and bureaucratic sources, she tracks immunological science and medicine as a site for environmental advocates, anticolonial activists, and human rights proponents to make claims to health and welfare. She has also explored her historical interest in human life through "the animal": she has written on legal deliberations on animal violence in interwar Britain, laboratory animals in Republican China, and is currently researching the emergence of moral and legal "personhood" for animals and the environment in the 1970s.
Anin received her BA in History and Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry from Yale University and her MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Gates Cambridge Scholar.
Anna Speyart works on the social and cultural history of science in early modern Europe. She is writing a dissertation on the science and technology of freezing in early modernity. It traces the use of ice and snow from harvest to application in scientific, medical, and consumer contexts. She has previously worked on games and play in erudite culture and intellectual sociability in the sixteenth century. Before coming to Princeton, Anna received a BA in History from University College London and an MA in Cultural and Intellectual history from the Warburg Institute. Her work has been supported by, among others, the Medici Archive Project and The Royal Society.
In the Spring of 2024, Anna will be a visiting student at the École normale supérieure (ENS-PSL) in Paris.
Job Titles:
- Adviser
- Henry Putnam University Professor
- of Science
Austen Van Burns studies how physicists, mathematicians, logicians, and linguistic philosophers represented and conveyed knowledge during the rise of European fascism. She focuses on members of the Unity of Science movement who, despite conditions which hobbled their scholarship and endangered their lives, did not emigrate before the outbreak…
Job Titles:
- Director of Graduate Studies
- Professor
Job Titles:
- Ex Officio
- Member of Committee
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Job Titles:
- Academic Research & Administrative Project Assistant
Job Titles:
- Susan Dod Brown Professor of Classics
Job Titles:
- Technology Services Manager
Job Titles:
- Shared Grants Manager, Research and Project Administration
Chandler Allen is a doctoral student in the History of Science, with particular focus on intersections between modern and contemporary art and science and those who skirt the history-fiction divide. Prior to Princeton, she worked as a curator and associate for galleries, museums, and auction houses in New York and London, and earned an MPhil in…
Job Titles:
- Member of the Executive Committee
- Henry Charles Lea Professor
- Minor Adviser
Job Titles:
- Director
- Member of the Executive Committee
- Director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center
- Ex Officio
- Member of Committee
- Professor
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of History and Human Values
Job Titles:
- Rosengarten Chair of Modern and Contemporary History Professor of History Acting Director, Program in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Member of the Executive Committee
Elizabeth is a Ph.D. student in the History of Science Program. Her research centers on the histories of mathematics and physics in the 19th and 20th centuries. She is particularly interested in scientific communities, focusing on how they are defined and established, how they interact with one another, and the ways in which "outsiders" affect…
Job Titles:
- Sociology and Public Affairs
Job Titles:
- Professor
- Science / Environmental / History of Science / Women / Gender / Sexuality
Job Titles:
- Member of the Executive Committee
- of Science
- Professor
Job Titles:
- Member of the Executive Committee
- Adviser
- Professor
- Science / Environmental / History of Science / Women / Gender / Sexuality
Job Titles:
- Member of the Executive Committee
- Associate Professor of East Asian Studies and
- of Science
Job Titles:
- Visiting Student Research Collaborator ( VSRC )
I study the history of medicine, focusing on the United States in the 20th century. I earned a BA in History and German from NYU in 2016. For my honors thesis, I researched and wrote on the history of the nutritional deficiency disease pellagra in the American South. After a brief stint in editing, I then moved to the History and Philosophy of…
I study the histories of law, technology, and extraterritoriality in the twentieth century. My dissertation follows legal disputes surrounding the first communications satellites launched in the 1960s. I ask how legal and technological practices surrounding the satellites both implemented and reconfigured ideas of extraterritoriality and empire…
Job Titles:
- Claude and Lore Kelly Professor in European Studies Professor of History and International Affairs
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of History and East Asian Studies
Job Titles:
- Director of Graduate Studies, History of Science
Job Titles:
- Member of the Executive Committee
- Henry Charles Lea Professor
- Minor Adviser
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of History and Hellenic Studies Chair, Center for the Study of Late Antiquity
Job Titles:
- Administrative Coordinator
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Member of the Executive Committee
Job Titles:
- Professor of History and East Asian Studies
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Sociology
Job Titles:
- Manager
- Manager, Center of Collaborative
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Member of the Executive Committee
- Director of Graduate Studies, History of Science
Jin-Woo Choi is a sixth-year PhD candidate specializing in early modern European social and cultural history, with a particular focus on climate and environment. His dissertation, entitled "Melting Memories: Meteorology and the Great Winter of 1709," brings together sources from over 40 archives across Italy, Germany, France, Britain and North…
Jingwen Li is a first-year Ph.D. student in the History of Science Program at Princeton. Her research focuses on interactions between media technologies and the human body with a comparative approach. She is currently interested in the history of sensory (visual and auditory) impairment. In past projects, Jingwen has done research on…
I study the history of maritime Southeast Asia, particularly the Philippines under Spain and the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I'm primarily interested in knowledge-making techniques and practices under empire, across a variety of fields including anthropology, law, geography, linguistics, and other constituent…
Joe Bishop works at the intersection of American science and medicine around the turn of the twentieth century. He is currently interested in how the pursuit of scientific authority shaped the food and drug industries and transformed scientific standards. He also focuses on how contending approaches to the environment recast the concepts of…
Job Titles:
- Undergraduate Program Director, History of Science
Job Titles:
- Undergraduate Program Administrator
Kathryn (Kate) Carpenter is a PhD candidate in History of Science at Princeton University whose research focuses on the intersection of environmental history and history of science. Her dissertation is a social and scientific history of storm chasing in the United States since the 1950s. It draws on archival sources, scientific publications,…
Job Titles:
- Member of the Executive Committee
- Professor
- Undergraduate Program Director, History of Science ( HOS )
Job Titles:
- Member of the Executive Committee
- Henry Putnam University Professor of History and Public Affairs
Job Titles:
- Data and Project Coordinator
Job Titles:
- Professor of History Director of the Center for Collaborative History
Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East; Professor of Near Eastern Studies and History
Job Titles:
- Graduate Program Administrator, History and History of Science
Job Titles:
- Founding Director
- Founding Director of the Center
Lea Eisenstein is a PhD student in the History of Science program. Her work focuses on the history of health, medicine, and medical technology in the United States from the 19th century to the present day. She analyzes the social and cultural dimensions of these subjects, especially with respect to gender, sexuality, race, and disability.
Job Titles:
- Graduate Program Administrator
Job Titles:
- Associate
- Chairman
- Dodge Professor
Job Titles:
- Coordinator
- Events and Communications Coordinator
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Member of the Executive Committee
Job Titles:
- Member of the Executive Committee
- Graduate Financial Officer
- of Science
- Smith Family Professor
Job Titles:
- Technical Support Specialist
I am a Ph.D. student in the Program for the History of Science with research interests in Early Modern science; the history of the imagination; visual culture and scientific illustration. Before coming to Princeton I completed an M.Sci. at the University of Sydney with a thesis called "Optical Instruments and the Early Modern…
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of History David L. Rike University Preceptor
Job Titles:
- Member of the Executive Committee
- Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History Professor
Job Titles:
- Director
- Member of the Executive Committee
- Member of Committee
- Paula Chow Professor of International and Regional Studies Professor
Midori Kawaue studies how interactions between the indigenous population and the colonial settlers from the 17th to 19th centuries produced new scientific knowledge at a global level. She is writing a comparative history of the Ainu people, the indigenous people of northern Japan, and the Native Americans. Her first co-edited book is James…
Job Titles:
- Business & Finance Manager
Mishka's research focuses on the history of psychiatry in colonial and apartheid South Africa. She is also interested in the history of psychology, colonial medicine, and disability studies. She completed her undergraduate degree at Rhodes University in South Africa, and her master's degree at New York University, where she researched the…
Job Titles:
- Member of the Executive Committee
- Professor of History and Hellenic Studies
Pallavi is a PhD candidate in the History of Science program and a Gender and Sexuality Studies certificate student. She is interested in the history of medicine, technology, disability and the body. Her dissertation is on the history of medicine and technology in the Paralympic Games. Before starting graduate…
Job Titles:
- Paula Chow Professor of International and Regional Studies Professor
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of History Class of 1942 University Preceptor in History
URB 202 Documentary Film and the City: The Trenton Project (seminar, Fall 2016, Fall 2017, with Purcell Carson)
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor
- Member of Committee
Job Titles:
- Egyptologist and Historian, ‘Wonderful Mentor' and Transformative Department Chair, Dies at 89
Job Titles:
- Director of Graduate Studies
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Anthropology and the Richard Stockton Bicentennial Preceptor
Sara Tridenti is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the History of Science Program at Princeton. Her research unearths part of the deep history contained in the ground beneath our feet by tracing the development and practice of soil microbiology in the United States. In her dissertation, Sara aims to weave together a history of soil science,…
Job Titles:
- Nissan Professor in Japanese Studies Professor of History and East Asian Studies
Job Titles:
- Librarian for History and African American Studies
Job Titles:
- Susan Dod Brown Professor of Classics
Job Titles:
- Edwards Professor of American History Professor of History and African American Studies
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of History and Hellenic Studies
Job Titles:
- Professor of East Asian Studies and
Job Titles:
- Member of the Executive Committee
- Professor in the History of Science
- Thomas M. Siebel Professor in the History of Science
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies and
I study the history of science and science communication, urban history, and modern American social, political, and cultural history. I am working on a dissertation that is an urban history of science of Washington, D.C. at the turn of the twentieth century. It focuses on how local conditions of space, race, urban change, and intellectual…
In 2001, The Davis Center instituted the Visiting Stone Professorship in honor of Professor Lawrence Stone, the founding director of the Center. The program brings a distinguished historian to Princeton for a short period to deliver lectures and engage in scholarly conversations with the members of the History Department. Lectures will also appear in print form in a book series from Princeton University Press.
Wesley Viner specializes in the history of early modern Christianity and science. His dissertation, "Reading, Revelation, and Nature: Biblical Interpretation and Natural Philosophy in Early Modern England," examines the rise of Mosaic natural philosophy and its effects upon biblical interpretation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England…
Job Titles:
- Member of Committee
- Professor
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies and
Job Titles:
- Director of Undergraduate Studies
- Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History Professor of History and the Program in Judaic Studies
Job Titles:
- Behrman Professor in the Humanities, Professor
Yang is a PhD candidate in the History of Science program. She is currently working on her dissertation, titled "Antibiotics, Scientific Expertise, and Pharmaceutical Marketplace in the People's Republic of China, 1949-1990," which examines the interrelated development of science, technology, and medicine in modern China through a history of…
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor
- Associate Director
- Member of the Executive Committee
Zoe Zimmermann focuses on colonial knowledge production in seventeenth-century North America. She is interested in studying how colonial naturalists, botanists, and cartographers interfaced with and exploited Indigenous guides and informants and how Indigenous epistemologies were filtered through the colonial lens.
In 2022, she…