Masthead

Nick Barone is a  third-year Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Princeton, specializing in modern Britain and Europe. His research focuses on the social, cultural, and intellectual dimensions of political apathy in nineteenth-century Britain and its empire, with an eye towards homologous developments on the continent. He has secondary interests in the comparative history of European statecraft, post-Kantian philosophy, aesthetics, and the history of the family. Nick graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Vassar College in 2019 with a B.A. in English and History. He has also completed graduate work at Brown University in literary studies.

Zach Bates is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Calgary, and an instructor of history at Columbus Technical College. His primary area of research is the political and intellectual history of the first British Empire from 1688 to 1776, and his current dissertation project is a study of the political thought and practices of two generations of “revolutionary” Scottish colonial administrators from 1710 to 1763. He also has interests in the historiography of the early modern British world in the long eighteenth century and its influences on the politics of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, and the relationship between film, history, and culture. His writings and reviews have appeared in the Journal of the History of Ideas (including this Blog), Journal of British Cinema and Television, and Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography; and are forthcoming in the Journal of British Studies and History.

Kelby Bibler is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Memphis, where he studies the philosophy of mind and embodied cognition. His research uses the methodological frameworks of phenomenology and 4E cognition to investigate the perceptual contents and effects of non-traditional states of consciousness. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of this work, he grounds his research in empirical data and the history of philosophy, attempting to display its application for our personal and social lives.

Lyes Benarbane is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. He works on literature and intellectual history in North Africa and the Middle East. His dissertation explores how the theme of decline in the twentieth century Arab novel expressed a paradoxical hopefulness. He is also interested in East-West political and literary contact from the early-modern period to the present.

Oscar Broughton is a Ph.D. candidate in Global Intellectual History at the Free University Berlin. His research interests include the Global History of Ideas, Food History and the History of Knowledge, particularly in relation to Brazil, Britain and Germany. His current dissertation explores the Global History of Guild Socialism during the early twentieth century by examining the circulation and intersection of different forms of practical and theoretical knowledge.

Nuala P. Caomhánach is a doctoral student in the Department of History at New York University and evolutionary biologist at the American Museum of Natural History. Her research focuses on the concept, meaning, and construction of biological Time and Space across three bodies of scientific knowledge—Ecological, Malagasy, and Phylogenetic—as applied to conservation ideology and policy from the late nineteenth century to the present day. In short, her dissertation aims to understand how Madagascar became the botanical museum to save all of nature (and thus, mankind).

Jonathon Catlin is an Ph.D. Candidate in History and the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities (IHUM) at Princeton University, where he studies modern European intellectual history. His research centers on the concept of catastrophe and philosophical responses to the Holocaust in German and Jewish thought. He received his M.A. in philosophy from KU Leuven and his B.A. in Fundamentals: Issues & Texts from the University of Chicago. His writings have appeared in The Point, Post45, and Antisemitism Studies.

Sanjana Chowdhury is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at Texas Christian University. She has also completed a graduate certificate in Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies. Sanjana is the copy editor of the digital humanities project Teaching Transatlanticism, an online resource for teaching nineteenth-century Anglo-American print culture. Her peer reviewed essay on Hinduism has been published in the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women’s Writing (ed. Dr. Lesa Scholl), 2022. Her research interests include Long Nineteenth-Century literature, marxist theory, postcolonial theory, critical race theory, and British Empire history. She is currently researching foodways of the British Raj.

Alexander Collin is a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam where he works on northern Europe from the 1490s to the 1700s. His doctoral thesis aims to test the historical applicability of theories of decision making from economics and organizational studies, considering to what extent we should historicize the idea of ‘The Decision’ and to what extent it is a human universal. The project has been funded by the Leverhulme Trust and the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst. Alexander has written for The Historian magazine, Shells and Pebbles, The History of Knowledge Blog, as well as academic publications. Alongside his historical work, he also contributes reports to the Oxford Covid-19 Government Response Tracker. He studied at King’s College London, Humboldt University Berlin, the University of Cambridge, and Viadrina University Frankfurt.

Kristin Engelhardt, born in Hamburg, completed her BA studies in German and Italian Literature at the Universities of Hamburg and Geneva. As part of a double degree program, she received her Master’s degree in French and Francophone Studies from Humboldt University in Berlin and the University Ca’ Foscari in Venice. Her thesis explores the reception of French Surrealism in the GDR and, in particular, the anthology Surrealismus in Paris. 1919-1939 by Karl-Heinz Barck, published by Reclam in 1986. Her general research interests include avant-gardes of the 20th century with a special focus on Surrealism, Menippean satire, authors of the early modern period, and Fashion Theory. She is currently working as an editor at rethink GmbH in Berlin.

Andrew Gibson is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Government at Georgetown University and a Hans J. Morgenthau Fellow with the Notre Dame International Security Center. He is currently writing a dissertation on the “transatlantic Machiavelli,” focusing on twentieth-century debates over the Florentine’s political-historical legacy. He holds MAs from Georgetown University and the University of Chicago and earned his BA (Honors, Phi Beta Kappa) from James Madison College at Michigan State University. His interests revolve around early modern republicanism, German historicism, and the history of strategic thought.

Matias X. Gonzalez holds a bachelor degree in History from the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa in Mexico City. He then moved to Buenos Aires where he earned an MA in conceptual history from the Universidad Nacional de San Martín. He is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Turin in Global History of Empires. His research has moved from a conceptual history of socialism towards a social-conceptual history of the disagreeing concepts and imaginaries of the nation in nineteenth century Mexico and France. His general research interests go from intellectual and conceptual history to the “philosophy of the social sciences”, to labor history and inter-connected, global, history.

Cynthia Houng is a doctoral candidate in the department of history at Princeton University. Her academic interests lie at the intersection of art and economic history. She began her academic career as a modernist, but now studies Renaissance and Early Modern European history and art history. A California girl transplanted to New York City, she tries to steal time away from her academic work to explore the city’s diverse spaces for arts and culture.

Emily Hull is a PhD candidate at the UCL Institute of the Americas funded by a Wolfson Postgraduate Scholarship in the Humanities. Emily’s PhD thesis uses the life of Irving Kristol, the former Trotskyist and so-called “godfather of neoconservatism,” as a lens through which to explore a range of transformations in American intellectual and political life during the twentieth century.

Alec Israeli is an assistant editor at Jacobin magazine and a recent alumnus of Trinity College, University of Cambridge, where he earned an MPhil with distinction in Political Thought and Intellectual History as a recipient of a Dunlevie King’s Hall Studentship. His research considers overlaps of intellectual history and labor history in the 19th-century Atlantic world, focusing on theorizations of free versus unfree labor in both political-economic and metaphysical terms. He is additionally interested in the philosophy of history (and the history of the philosophy of history). Alec received a BA in History from Princeton University. His work has also appeared in the Vanderbilt Historical Review, the Columbia Journal of History, the Princeton Progressive Magazine, and the Mudd Library Blog.

Rachel Kaufman is a PhD student in History at UCLA and focuses on memory, religion, and diasporic identity in Mexico and the U.S. Southwest. She is interested in the ways in which literary and historical texts transmit the past and the affective world of the archive, and her current research focuses on New Mexico crypto-Jewish memory practices and the Mexican Inquisition. Her prose has been published in Rethinking History and The Yale Historical Review, and her poetry has appeared on poets.org and in the Harvard Review, Southwestern American Literature, Western Humanities Review, JuxtaProse, and elsewhere. Her first book of poetry, Many to Remember, was recently published by Dos Madres Press. She received her B.A. from Yale in English and History.

Disha Karnad Jani is a writer and historian from Markham, Ontario. She is currently a graduate student in the Department of History at Princeton University, where she studies global/transnational history. She is interested in the politics and practices of anti-imperial resistance between the World Wars, in the British Empire and across sites of empire’s incarnation.

Jonas Knatz is a Ph.D. candidate in modern European history at New York University. He holds a B.A. in Liberal Arts from University College Maastricht and an M.A. in Interdisciplinary Antisemitism Studies from Technical University Berlin. He is currently writing a conceptual history of the Western European automation of labor, focusing on how the transformation of work after World War II constituted an intellectual event that altered the concepts with which philosophers, sociologists, engineers, and politicians understood their historical moment.

Tamara Maatouk is a Ph.D. candidate in Middle Eastern history at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She holds a B.A. in Cinema and Television from USEK and an M.A. in History from the American University of Beirut. Her research explores the lived experiences and expectations of Egyptians during the 1960s through the lens of cinema. She is the author of Understanding the Public Sector in Egyptian Cinema: A State Venture, Cairo Papers in Social Science 35:3 (Cairo; New York: The American University in Cairo Press, 2019).

Pablo Martínez Gramuglia received a doctorate in Literature at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina. He is currently a Profesor Ayudante Doctor  at the Universidad de Navarra, Spain. His current research in Intellectual History focuses on relationships between authors and editors in Latin America between 1840 and 1940, but he tends to spend time reading about anything else. Pablo’s previous research investigates the public sphere in different contexts, from late colonialism to the Enlightenment and independence revolutions in Spanish America. His book La forja de una opinión pública, based on his doctoral dissertation, is open access and publicly available.

Jacob Saliba is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of history at Boston College where he studies modern European intellectual history. His research focuses primarily on modern French intellectual thought as was its dialogical encounter with Catholic thinkers, both in politics as well as in philosophical discourses. Some major themes include existentialism, phenomenology, New Theology, and the Holocaust.

Glauco Schettini is a PhD candidate in history at Fordham University, New York. His research centers on religion and politics in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe and the Atlantic world. His dissertation, titled “The Invention of Catholicism: A Global Intellectual History of the Catholic Counterrevolution, 1780s-1840s,” investigates how European and Latin American counterrevolutionary thinkers reinvented Catholicism during the Age of Revolutions. An alumnus of the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, Italy, he is the author of more than a dozen articles and book chapters.

Philippe Schmid is a PhD candidate in Modern History at the University of St Andrews. His work focuses on the collection and reuse of scholarly books in early modern Germany. Employing a book historical methodology for the wider history of knowledge, he is particularly interested in why used books played such a central role for the early modern transmission of knowledge. From 2017 to 2018 he was a research fellow at the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel, and in 2021 he was a visiting fellow at Harvard University.

Maria Wiegel is a PhD candidate in North American Studies at the University of Cologne and works at the intersection of history, fiction, and gender studies. Her current research focuses on the depiction of the 1960s in American literature published after 9/11. She is especially interested in paranoia, surveillance, cultural memory studies, and metamodernism. Her writings and reports have appeared in Critical Intertexts, Food, Fatness and Fitness and HSozKult, and are forthcoming in zeitgeschichteonline and the collective volume Encountering Pennywise: Critical Perspectives on Stephen King’s IT.

Luke Wilkinson is a MPhil student at the University of Cambridge studying an MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History. He is currently researching a thesis on the reconstruction of Islam in Muhammad Iqbal and Ruhollah Khomeini with a focus on how these two towering magi of Islam developed Islamic ideas of temporality, freedom, and revolution in conversation with European philosophers like Bergson and Heidegger. He navigates the range of influence of Iqbal in Iran while rebuilding Khomeini “the Ayatollah” as a complex philosopher. His other interests include: phenomenology, philosophy of time, Mediterranean political thought, philosophies of relativity and British idealism, and mysticism in the twentieth century.

Grant Wong is a Ph.D. student in History at the University of South Carolina. His research is based in the history of twentieth century American popular culture and considers its import on its own terms, alongside its impact on the fields of intellectual, political, public, and global history. Grant is particularly interested in how popular culture manifests itself in all aspects of American life, especially within music, consumerism, commodification, gender, sexuality, and youth culture.

Tingfeng Yan is a Ph.D. student in Social Thought and History at the University of Chicago. He holds an MA in History of Political Thought and Intellectual History from University College London and Queen Mary University of London and a BSc in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics. He is interested in the American Revolution and the early American republic.

Stephanie Zgouridi is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Princeton University. Her current research focuses on the conceptual history of generation(s) in modern Europe, particularly in France, Germany, and Spain. She received her M.A. in European Studies from KU Leuven and her B.A. in History and Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley.