Meet the authors of the 64-3 issue, July 2022.
Guy Burak is the Librarian for Middle Eastern, Islamic and Jewish Studies at New York University’s Elmer Holmes Bobst Library. He is the author of The Second Formation of Islamic Law: The Hanafi School in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2015). His research focuses on the legal, intellectual, and visual histories of the Islamic world in the early modern period. He is currently working on a monograph on Ottoman dynastic law.
Evguenia Davidova is Professor in the Department of International and Global Studies at Portland State University. Her research interests focus on the late Ottoman and post-Ottoman Balkans: trade, travel, nationalism, social history of medicine, gender, and public health. She has published in Slavic Review, European History Quarterly, CLIO Femmes,Genre et Histoire, Turcica, Balkanologie, Aspasia, and Journal of European Economic History, among others. She is the author of Balkan Transitions to Modernity and Nation-States. Through the Eyes of Three Generations of Merchants (1780s-1890s) (Brill, 2012), and the editor of Wealth in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman Balkans: A Socio-Economic History (I. B. Tauris, 2016). Davidova’s new project, with the provisional title, “Dutiful Nurses: War, Public Health, and Gender in Southeast Europe (1878–1939),” focuses on the intertwining processes of state- and nation-building in which public health played a key role.
Krisztina Fehérváry, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, received a Ph.D. in Anthropology from The University of Chicago. She is currently working on two projects, one investigating branding practices during state-socialism, and the other looking comparatively at the relationship between social welfare systems and political economic changes over the past 50 years through the lens of the body, in particular of teeth (orthodontia). She is the author of the award-winning monograph Politics in Color and Concrete: Socialist Materialities and the Middle Class in Hungary (Indian University Press, 2013), on aesthetic regimes in state-socialist and post-socialist Hungary. A previous article in CSSH titled Goods and States: The Political Logic of State Socialist Material Culture (2009) can be read as a companion piece to her “National Retro” paper in this issue. More images of retro can be found on her website.
Heather Ferguson is an Associate Professor of Ottoman and Middle Eastern History at Claremont McKenna College. Heather was an American Council of Learned Societies Fellow from 2014–2015, for The Proper Order of Things: Language, Power and Law in Ottoman Administrative Discourses (Stanford University Press, 2018). Her second book project, supported by an NEH summer stipend and an ACLS Burkhardt Fellowship, is titled “Sovereign Valedictions: ‘Last Acts’ and Archival Ventures in Ottoman and Habsburg Courts.”Her research focuses broadly on comparative early modern empires, categories of sovereignty and difference, linkages between archives and hegemonic constructions of power, as well as on legal and urban transformations around the Mediterranean. She serves as Editor of the Review of Middle East Studies, and Associate Editor for the International Journal of Islamic Architecture.
Xiaoxing Jin obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame in 2019 and is a visiting fellow at the Department of the History of Science, Harvard University. He specializes in evolutionary ideas, intellectual history, comparative history, the history of biology, and the history of science, technology, and medicine in China.
Koh Choon Hwee is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Educated in Singapore, Delhi, Tucson, and Beirut, she is broadly interested in economics, infrastructure, and money (and recently, cryptocurrencies). Her research on the Ottoman postal system has been supported by various competitive grants and has received awards from the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) (Malcolm H. Kerr Dissertation award 2020) as well as Yale University (the Hans Gatzke dissertation prize). Her article, “The Ottoman Postmaster: Contractors, Communication and Early Modern State Formation” came out in Past & Present in 2021. Before joining UCLA, she worked as a communications intern at a Deep Tech investment firm and as an adjunct lecturer at a public policy school in Singapore.
Rafael de Bivar Marquese is a History Professor at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, and fellow of the CNPq, the Brazilian research council. He is the author of Administração & Escravidão: Ideias sobre a gestão da agricultura escravista brasileira (Editora Hucitec, 1999); Feitores do Corpo, Missionários da Mente. Senhores, letrados e o controle dos escravos nas Américas, 1660–1860 (Companhia das Letras, 2004); and Os tempos plurais da escravidão no Brasil. Ensaios de História e Historiografia (Intermeios, 2020). He also co-authored (with Tâmis Parron and Márcia Berbel) Slavery and Politics. Brazil and Cuba, 1790–1850 (University of New Mexico Press, 2016); and (with Dale W. Tomich, Reinaldo Funes Monzote, and Carlos Venegas Fornias) Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery. A Visual History of the Plantation in the Nineteenth-century Atlantic World (University of North Carolina Press, 2021). He is currently working on a book project on the history of slavery and the global coffee economy.
Dr. Devika Shankar is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Hong Kong. She is a historian of modern South Asia and the Indian Ocean region, and her research interests lie primarily in the fields of environmental history, economic history, and science and technology studies. Her current book project focuses on the port of Cochin (now known as Kochi) on India’s southwest coast and examines how growing environmental concerns generated by the port’s shifting coastline intersected with visions for its development in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
E. Natalie Rothman is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Toronto and Chair of the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. A member of the inaugural cohort of the College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada (2014–2021), Rothman is the author of Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice and Istanbul (Cornell University Press, 2011) and The Dragoman Renaissance: Diplomatic Interpreters and the Routes of Orientalism (Cornell University Press, 2021), with its companion digital project, The Dragoman Renaissance Research Platform. Her current collaborative project with Guy Burak and Heather Ferguson on early modern trans-imperial archives is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Michael David Snodgrass is an Associate Professor of History and Director of the Global and International Studies Program at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Prior to embarking on his research on Spanish guestworkers in postwar Germany, his publications focused on twentieth-century Mexican history. His most recent studies examine emigration, return migration, and migration policy from the perspectives of Mexico City and Western sending communities. Prior investigations explored Mexico’s labor history, with a focus on labor-state relations and workers in such industries as steel, mining, sugar, and glass. He serves as Associate Editor of Labor: Studies in Working-Class History and authored Deference and Defiance in Monterrey: Workers, Paternalism, and Revolution in Mexico, 1890–1950 (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Sarah Abrevaya Stein is Professor of History, Viterbi Family Chair in Mediterranean Jewish Studies at UCLA, and Sady and Ludwig Kahn Director of UCLA’s Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies. A former Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, she is the author or editor of nine books, many of them award-winning. Stein’s most recent book, Family Papers: a Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century(Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2019), was named a Best Book of 2019 by the Economist, a New York Times Editors’ Choice Book, and was a National Jewish Book Award Finalist.
