Osama Abi-Mershed is Associate Professor of History at Georgetown University, where he teaches courses on North Africa, the Middle East, and the Western Mediterranean (medieval and modern); on Arab and Ottoman societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and on colonial and post-colonial Franco-Maghribi relations. His academic research focuses on the ideologies and practices of colonial modernization in nineteenth century Algeria, and on the parallel processes of state-and nation-making in France and North Africa. He is the author of Apostles of Modernity: Saint-Simonians and the French Civilizing Mission in Algeria (Stanford, 2010).
Alice L. Conklin is Professor of History at Ohio State University. She is a cultural, political, and intellectual historian of modern France and its Empire with a focus on the twentieth century. Her most recent book is In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology and Empire in France, 1850-1950 (Cornell, 2013), which won the David H. Pinkney Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies. An illustrated French edition of the book, Exposer l’humanité: race, ethnologie et empire en France, 1850-1950 (Editions scientifiques du MSNH) appeared in 2015. She is currently working on a transnational history of French antiracism between 1945 and 1965, when ideals for cooperation among a broad coalition of scholars and activists around the world collided with unforeseen political realignments triggered by the Cold War. She taught at the University of Rochester for thirteen years before moving to Ohio State in 2004 and has been the recipient of several fellowships, including a Guggenheim and a Fulbright. She was awarded a Distinguished Scholar Award from OSU in 2016.
James L. Gelvin is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He received his B.A. from Columbia University, his Master’s in International Affairs from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, and his Ph.D. from Harvard University. He has taught at Boston College, Harvard University, MIT, and the American University in Beirut. A specialist in the modern social and cultural history of the Arab East, he is author of four books: The Arab Uprisings: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2012, 2014); The Modern Middle East: A History (Oxford University Press, 2004, 2007, 2011, 2015); The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War (Cambridge University Press, 2005, 2007, 2014); and Divided Loyalties: Nationalism and Mass Politics in Syria at the Close of Empire (University of California Press, 1998), along with numerous articles and chapters in edited volumes. He is also co-editor of Global Muslims in the Age of Steam and Print, 1850-1930 (University of California Press, 2013). In 2015, Gelvin received the Middle East Studies Association’s Undergraduate Education Award.
Julian Go is Professor of Sociology at Boston University. His most recent books include Patterns of Empire: the British and American Empires, 1688 to Present (Cambridge, 2011), Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory (Oxford, 2016), Global Historical Sociology, co-edited with George Lawson (Cambridge, 2016) and Fielding Transnationalism, co-edited with Monika Krause (Wiley & Sons, 2016).
Michael Hechter is Foundation Professor in the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University and Professor of Sociology at the University of Copenhagen. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he studies contentious collective action—principally in its nationalist and separatist forms—and its converse, social order. His most recent book is Alien Rule (2013), which argues that this widely denigrated form of governance may, under certain conditions, attain legitimacy.
Diana Kim is a postdoctoral Prize Fellow in Economics, History, and Politics at Harvard University; and will begin as Assistant Professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in the Autumn of 2016. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago (2013) and her research focuses on the transnational politics and history of markets across Southeast and East Asia, with particular interest in the regulation of vice, illicit economies, and legacies of Empire and colonialism. Her first book, is entitled Empires of Vice, analyzes the rise of opium prohibition in British Burma, Malaya, and French Indochina (1860-1940), and her second project addresses problems of outcast groups and “untouchable” labor in Japan, Korea, and India.
Matthew Lange is Professor of Sociology at McGill University. He is a comparative-historical sociologist working on states, violence, colonialism, and development and has written Lineages of Despotism and Development: British Colonialism and State Power (Chicago, 2009), Educations in Ethnic Violence: Identity, Educational Bubbles, and Resource Mobilization (Cambridge, 2012), Comparative-Historical Methods (SAGE, 2013), and Killing Others: A Natural History of Ethnic Violence (Cornell, 2016). He is also co-editor of States and Development: Historical Antecedents of Stagnation and Advance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and the Oxford Handbook of Transformations of the State (Oxford, 2015).
Adria Lawrence is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University. She studies colonialism, nationalism, conflict and collective action. Her book, Imperial Rule and the Politics of Nationalism: Anti-Colonial Protest in the French Empire (Cambridge University Press 2013), has received multiple awards, including the 2015 David Greenstone Book Prize, given by the American Political Science Association’s Politics and History Section, and the 2015 L. Carl Brown Book Prize, given by the American Institute for Maghrib Studies (AIMS). Her research reflects her expertise in the politics of North Africa. She is currently at work on two new projects. The first examines protest during the Arab Spring, analyzing how protest is initiated and why protest goals varied across cases. The second project investigates how foreign powers rule, studying the use of direct and indirect rule in the colonial world.
James Scott is the Sterling Professor of Political Science and Professor of Anthropology and is Director of the Agrarian Studies Program. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has held grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation, and has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Science, Science, Technology and Society Program at M.I.T., and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.
His research concerns political economy, comparative agrarian societies, theories of hegemony and resistance, peasant politics, revolution, Southeast Asia, theories of class relations and anarchism. He is currently teaching Agrarian Studies and Rebellion, Resistance and Repression.
Recent publications include Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale, 1997); “Geographies of Trust: Geographies of Hierarchy,” in Democracy and Trust, 1998; “State Simplifications and Practical Knowledge,” in People’s Economy, People’s Ecology, 1998; and The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale, 2009).
Dan Slater is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. His research explores and explains the social and historical foundations of political order, conflict, and accountability, especially but not exclusively in Southeast Asia. His first solo-authored book, Ordering Power: Contentious Politics and Authoritarian Leviathans in Southeast Asia (Cambridge, 2010) carries out a comparative-historical analysis covering seven Southeast Asian countries. He is also a co-editor (with Erik Kuhonta and Tuong Vu) of Southeast Asia in Political Science: Theory, Region, and Qualitative Analysis (Stanford University Press, 2008), which explores and assesses the contributions of Southeast Asian political studies to theoretical knowledge in comparative politics. His current book project (with Joseph Wong, under advance contract with Princeton University Press) addresses the question of why some authoritarian ruling parties concede democratic reforms from a position of strength.
Martin Thomas is Professor of Imperial History and Director of the Centre for the Study of War, State, and Society at the University of Exeter. He has written widely on the French Empire and European decolonization, his latest book being Fight or Flight: Britain, France and their Roads from Empire (Oxford University Press, 2014).
Maya Tudor’s research investigates the origins of stable, democratic and effective states across the developing world. Her book, ‘The Promise of Power’ (Cambridge University Press, 2013), was based upon her 2010 dissertation, which won the American Political Science Association’s Gabriel Almond Prize for the Best Dissertation in Comparative Politics. The book investigates the origins of India and Pakistan’s puzzling regime divergence in the aftermath of colonial independence. She is also the author of articles in Comparative Politics, Journal of Democracy, Party Politics and many edited volumes. She is currently working on three different research projects: one which examines the circumstances under which countries escape coup traps; a second (with Jakob Pethick) which details the political origins of successful implementation of India’s employment guarantee act; and a third (with Dan Slater) which explores the relationship between types of national identity and long-term regime trajectories.
She was educated at Stanford University (BA in Economics) and Princeton University (MPA in Development Studies and PhD in Politics and Public Policy). She has held Fellowships at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and Oxford University’s Centre for the Study of Inequality and Democracy. Before embarking on an academic career, Maya worked as a Special Assistant to Chief Economist Joseph Stiglitz at the World Bank, at UNICEF, in the United States Senate, and at the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee. A dual citizen of Germany and the United States, she has lived and worked in Bangladesh, Germany, France, India, Kenya, Myanmar, Pakistan, the Philippines, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Nicholas Hoover Wilson is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at SUNY-Stony Brook. He received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale. He is interested in the fiscal, administrative, and moral politics of empires, and his book project examines how the category of corruption within the English East India Company transformed during the Company’s emergence as a colonial power in South Asia.
Andreas Wimmer is the Lieber Professor Sociology and Political Philosophy at Columbia University. His research brings a long term and globally comparative perspective to the questions of how states are built and nations formed, how individuals draw ethnic and racial boundaries between themselves and others, and which kinds of political conflicts and war results from these processes. Wimmer’s articles have been published by top journals in sociology and political science. His recent work has resulted in two books, Waves of War: Nationalism, State Formation, and Ethnic Exclusion in the Modern World (Cambridge, 2013) and Ethnic Boundary Making (Oxford, 2013).
Jonathan Wyrtzen is assistant professor of Sociology, History, and International Affairs at Yale University. His research engages a set of related thematic areas that include empire and colonialism, state formation and non-state forms of political organization, ethnicity and nationalism, and religion and socio-political action. His work focuses on society and politics in North Africa and the Middle East, particularly with regards to interactions catalyzed by the expansion of European empires into this region. His first book, Making Morocco: Colonial Intervention and the Politics of Identity (Cornell University Press, 2015) examines how European colonial intervention in Morocco (1912–1956) established a new type of political field in which notions about and relationships among politics and identity formation were fundamentally transformed. His current project, tentatively titled Reimagining Political Space, focuses on a set of synchronic revolts in Morocco, Libya, Syria, Anatolia, and the Arabian Peninsula in the mid-1920s to comparatively examine the contingencies, counter-movements, and negotiations involved in the forging and negotiation of new political topographies in the Middle East and North Africa aftermath of World War I.