After 1776: Opportunities, Shocks, and Dangers

Jennifer Anderson is an associate professor of history at Stony Brook University, State University of New York (SUNY). She is the author of Mahogany: The Costs of Luxury in Early America (Harvard University Press, 2012). In 2021 she co-edited a special issue of Early American Studies with Anya Zilberstein, entitled “Empowering Appetites: The Political Economy and Culture of Food in the Early Atlantic.” Her recent research was supported by the American Council of Learned Societies and the Mellon Foundation. In 2020, she was also a scholar-in-residence at Preservation Long Island. Dr. Anderson received her PhD in Early American and Atlantic History from New York University in 2007.

David Armitage is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History and Chair of the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies at Harvard University. He received his BA, MA, PhD and LittD from the University of Cambridge. Armitage has lectured on six continents and has authored or edited eighteen books, including Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (Alfred A. Knopf, 2017), and The History Manifesto (with Jo Guldi, Cambridge University Press, 2014) which was named a 2014 New Statesman Book of the Year and one of the Most Influential Books of the Past 20 Years by the Chronical of Higher Education in 2018. He is currently working on a study of opera and international law.

Brooke Bauer is a citizen of the Catawba Nation of South Carolina and an associate professor of history at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her most recent book is Becoming Catawba: Catawba Women and Nation-building, 1540-1840 (University of Alabama Press, 2022). It won numerous awards including the Anne B. and James B. McMillan Prize in Southern History, the 2023 Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Book Award, the 2022 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Award, and the 2022 George C. Rogers, Jr. Award from the Southern Carolina Historical Society. Her research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Native American Scholars Initiative Fellowship from the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia (2020-21). She received her BA and MA from Winthrop University, and PhD from the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill.

Michael Blaakman is an associate professor of history at Princeton University. He received his BA from William & Mary and his PhD from Yale University in 2016. His dissertation won the 2017 Manuscript Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. This dissertation eventually became the book Speculation Nation: Land Mania in the Revolutionary American Republic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023). Speculation Nation received the Frederick Jackson Turner Award for the best first book in American History from the Organization of American Historians and was a finalist for the 2024 George Washington Prize. His next book project is tentatively entitled The Simcoes and the Enemies of the American Revolution.

Dame Linda Colley is the Shelby M.C. Davis 1958 Professor of History at Princeton University. She is the author of numerous books including Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (Yale University Press, 1992) which won the Wolfson Prize for History and The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History (Pantheon, 2007), named one of the best books of 2007 by The New York Times. Her most recent book is The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World (W.W. Norton, 2021). She received her PhD in 1982 from the University of Cambridge. Colley has been elected a Fellow of both the British Academy and the American Academy. In 2022, she was awarded a D.B.E. for services to history.

 Hannah Farber is an associate professor of history at Columbia University. She received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Her first book, Underwriters of the United States: How Insurance Shaped the American Founding (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture/University of North Carolina Press, 2021) won the 2021 John Lyman Book Award for U.S. Maritime History from the North American Society for Oceanic History and the 2023 Hagley Prize for Best Book in Business History from the Business History Conference. She has held several fellowships, including at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). She is a series editor for American Beginnings 1500-1900 at the University of Chicago Press.

Julia Gaffield is an associate professor of history at William & Mary. Her first book, Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World: Recognition after the Revolution (University of North Carolina Press, 2015) won the 2016 Mary Alice and Frederick Boucher Book Prize from the French Colonial Historical Society. Her research has been supported by the NEH, the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Her second book, I Have Avenged America: Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Haiti’s Fight for Freedom is forthcoming with Yale University Press in summer 2025. She received her PhD in 2012 from Duke University.

Eliga Gould is a professor of history at the University of New Hampshire. He received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 1993. From 2022-23 he was the Fritz and Claudine Kundrun Fellow at the ICJS. He has also held long-term fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Fulbright-Hays Program, the NEH, and the Charles Warren Center at Harvard. In 2025-26, he will be the Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford. His book, Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (Harvard University Press, 2012) was co-winner of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Book Prize, as well as a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize and a Library Journal Best Book of the Year. His current book project is tentatively titled: Peace and Independence: The Turbulent History of the United States' Founding Treaty.

Paul Halliday is the Julian Bishko Professor of History and Professor of Law at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Habeas Corpus: From England to Empire, among other works on the legal history of England and the British empire. His research has been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Institute for Advanced Study, among others. He routinely helps to brief the U.S. Supreme Court and others on questions in legal history, especially in cases of wrongful detention and firearms regulation.

Matthew Mosca is an associate professor of history and International Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. He completed his PhD in history and East Asian Languages from Harvard University in 2008. He has held fellowships at the University of California, Berkeley and the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Hong Kong. In the 2013-4 academic year he held a Mellon Fellowship for Assistant Professors at the Institute for Advanced Study. He is the author of From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy: The Question of India and the Transformation of Geopolitics in Qing China (Stanford University Press, 2013) and is an associate editor of Late Imperial China.

M’hamed Oualdi is full professor of history at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. He is the author of Esclaves et maîtres. Les mamelouks au service des beys de Tunis du XVIIe siècle aux années 1880 (Publications de la Sorbonne, 2011) [Slaves and Masters: The Mamluks in the Service of the Beys of Tunis from the 17th Century to the 1880s], and A Slave Between Empires: A Transimperial History of North Africa (Columbia University Press, 2020). His research has been supported by the European Research Council, the Institute of Advanced Studies (Paris) and he was the Fernand Braudel fellow of the European University Institute in Florence, Italy in 2015 as well as the 2015-16 Researcher-in-Residence at Ecole française de Rome in Rome. He received his PhD in 2008 from Sorbonne University (Paris 1- Panthéon -Sorbonne).

Chernoh Sesay, Jr. is an associate professor of religious studies at DePaul University where he has received an Excellence in Teaching Award from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. He is currently working on a manuscript entitled: Black Boston and the Making of African-American Freemasonry: Leadership, Religion, and Community in Early America. He has published articles in the New England Quarterly, the Journal of African American Studies, and the Forum for European Contributions to African American Studies. He has also written for Black Perspectives, the scholarly blog of the African American Intellectual History Society. He currently serves as an editorial board member for the journals, Global Black Thought and Early American Studies, An Interdisciplinary Journal, and as a member of the education committee for Old North Illuminated, an organization dedicating to advancing the public history and context of Boston’s Old North Church.

John Shovlin is a professor of history at New York University. His most recent book is Trading with the Enemy: Britain, France, and the 18th-Century Quest for a Peaceful World Order (Yale University Press, 2021). He is also the author of The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution (Cornell University Press, 2006) and the co-editor, along with Thomas Truxes and Louis Cullen, of The Bordeaux-Dublin Letters, 1757: Correspondence of an Irish Community Abroad (Oxford University Press, 2013), which was a part of the British Academy's Records of Social and Economic History Series. He has been a visiting scholar at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University, and the Institut National d’Études Démographiques (INED) in Paris. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago.

Asheesh Kapur Siddique is an assistant professor of history at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He holds a PhD from Columbia University, as well as an MPhil from the University of Oxford, and an AB from Princeton University. He has recently published his first book, The Archive of Empire: Knowledge, Conquest, and the Making of the Early Modern British World (Yale University Press, 2024). Siddique has held several fellowships, including a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Southern California, and a visiting postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Humanities & Information at Penn State University. His research has been supported by institutions such as the American Philosophical Society, the Huntington Library, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture, and the Social Science Research Council.

Sujit Sivasundaram is a professor of world history at the University of Cambridge. His most recent book, Waves Across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire (Chicago University Press, 2021) was the winner of the 2021 British Academy Prize for Global Cultural Understanding and the Bentley Book Prize for World History. It analyzed the age of revolutions from a new vista in the global oceanic south. He has held visiting fellowships in Paris, Singapore, Munich, and Sydney. In 2023, he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. Sivasundaram is the co-editor of several series, including Cambridge University Press’s Cambridge Oceanic Histories (with Alison Bashford and David Armitage) and Palgrave Macmillan’s World Environmental History series (with Vinita Damodaran, Rohan D'Souza, James Beattie). He is Syndic of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge and sits on various editorial boards, including Past & Present.

Paris Spies-Gans is a historian, art historian, and independent scholar. She holds a PhD and MA in History from Princeton University, an MA in Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art, and an AB in History and Literature from Harvard University. Her first book, A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, 1760-1830 (Yale University Press, 2022) was named one of the top art books of 2022 by The Art Newspaper and The Conversation. It received numerous awards and recognitions including the 2023 Stansky Book Prize for the Best Book on British Studies after 1800. She is currently working on a new book: A New Story of Art. Her research has been supported with fellowships from the Harvard Society of Fellows, J. Paul Getty Trust, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the Yale Center for British Art, the Lewis Walpole Library, and Princeton University.

James Stafford is an assistant professor of history at Columbia University. He is a historian of politics, law and intellectual life in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, interested in debates and struggles over property, trade, and global order. His first book, The Case of Ireland: Commerce, Empire, and the European Order, 1750-1848, was published in the Cambridge series Ideas in Context in 2022. For the 2024-25 academic year, he is an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin, where he is conducting research for a second book project on nineteenth-century European commercial treaties. His public writing and reviews have appeared in Dissent, the Guardian, the Nation, and Political Quarterly.

A scholar of the eighteenth-century Spanish Atlantic, Fidel J. Tavárez is assistant professor of history at Queens College of the City University of New York (CUNY). Before joining Queens College, he held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Chicago and the Freie Universität Berlin. His first book project, The Imperial Machine: Assembling the Spanish Commercial Empire in the Age of Enlightenment, is under contract with Oxford University Press. Tavárez is also working on a second book project, tentatively titled Plantation Dreams in the Eighteenth-Century Spanish Caribbean.

Robert Travers is a professor of history at Cornell University. He is the author of two books, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth Century India: the British in Bengal 1757-1793 (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Empires of Complaints: Mughal Law and the Making of British India, 1765-1793 (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Empires of Complaints received an honorable mention for the James Willard Hurst Book Prize for socio-legal history from the Law and Society Association (2023). Travers was a 2023-24 NEH Fellow as well as a Willis F. Doney Member at the School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University, 2023-24. He is currently working on a new history of the parliamentary impeachment trial of the British Governor of Bengal, Warren Hastings.

Ali Yaycıoğlu is an associate professor of history at Stanford University. He holds degrees in International Relations from the Middle East Technical University, Ottoman History from Bilkent University and Islamic Studies at McGill University. He completed his PhD in History and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard in 2008, followed by post-doctoral studies in the Agha Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard and later in Hellenic Studies at Princeton. He is the author of Partners of the Empire: Crisis of the Ottoman Order in the Age of Revolutions (Stanford, 2016) and The Uncertain Past: Empire, Republic and Politics (In Turkish, 2024); and the co-edited the Ottoman Digital Humanities Special Issue of the Journal of Ottoman and Turkish Studies (2023) and Crafting History: Essays on the Ottoman World and Beyond in Honor of Cemal Kafadar (Boston, 2023). Currently he is serving as the director of the Abbasi Program of Islamic Studies at the Middle East Studies at Stanford University.

Rosemarie Zagarri is a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University. Zagarri was awarded the rank of Distinguished University Professor, the highest faculty rank at GMU, from the Board of Visitors in 2013. She has received numerous nationally competitive research fellowships including from the NEH (1997-98, 2011-12), the American Antiquarian Society, the American Philosophical Society, and George Washington’s Mount Vernon. She was elected a Fellow of the Society of American Historians in 2023. Zagarri is the author of four books, including Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). Her current book project is Liberty or Oppression: Thomas Law and the Problem of Empire in Colonial British India and the Early American Republic. She received her PhD from Yale University.