THE DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY WELCOMES SIX NEW COLLEAGUES

 

LAUREN CLAY, PhD University of Pennsylvania (2003)
Lauren Clay, Assistant Professor, specializes in the social and cultural history of early modern France. She will be on leave in Fall 2008, funded by a fellowship from the NEH, finishing a book entitled The Commercialization of Culture: Theater in France and the Colonies, 1680-1789.  Professor Clay comes to Vanderbilt from Texas A&M.

Professor Clay will teach two courses Spring 2009: HIST 200 The History Workshop and HIST 300b Introduction to Historical Methods and Research.

 

 

 

JULIA PHILLIPS COHEN, PhD Stanford University (expected 2008)
Julia Phillips Cohen joins Vanderbilt as an Assistant Professor in the Program in Jewish Studies and the Department of History. Her work focuses on the imperial loyalties and local identities of Ottoman Jews in different urban centers of the eastern Mediterranean. She has received several grants in support of her work, including fellowships from the Stanford Humanities Center, the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Institute for Turkish Studies and the American Research Institute in Turkey.

Professor Cohen will teach  JS 115F 09 Jews and Muslims: a Modern History  in Fall 2008.  In Spring 2009, she will offer two courses:  JS 157 Modern Jewish History and HIST 287c Cities of Europe and the Middle East.

 

 

 

 

LEOR HALEVI, PhD Harvard (2002)
Leor Halevi, Associate Professor, is a scholar of early Islam.  His book, Muhammad’s Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society (Columbia University Press, 2007), was awarded the Albert Hourani Prize of the Middles East Studies Association.  He will be on leave in the coming academic year, funded by a fellowship from the NEH,  working on a new book, "Commerce with Infidels: Islam and Cross-Cultural Trade.”  Professor Halevi was an ACLS Fellow in 2004, and a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress in 2005-06.

 

 

 

 

SARAH IGO, PhD Princeton University (2001)
Professor Igo joins Vanderbilt as Associate Professor.  Her primary research interests are in modern American cultural and intellectual history, the history of the human sciences, the sociology of knowledge, and the history of the public sphere. Her first book, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Harvard University Press, 2007), explores the relationship between survey data—opinion polls, sex surveys, consumer research—and modern understandings of self and nation, and was the winner of the President's Book Award of the Social Science History Association. She is currently at work on a cultural history of modern privacy, examined through legal debates, artistic and architectural movements, technological innovations, professional codes, and re-imaginings of domestic life. Professor Igo will teach HIST 200 in Fall 2008, and 288a, an upper-level seminar, and 302b Readings in American history: Civil War to the present in Spring 2009.  She comes to Vanderbilt from the University of Pennsylvania, where she was Associate Professor of History. 

OLE MOLVIG, PhD Princeton University (2006)
Ole Molvig, Assistant Professor, is a historian of the modern physical sciences who joins  Vanderbilt following 4 years on the faculty at Yale.  Professor Molvig completed his B.S. degrees at the University of Wisconsin in Physics, Astronomy, and History of Science, and did his graduate work at Princeton University where he examined the responses to Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. Specifically, Molvig explores the mechanisms through which consensus is reached regarding the meaning of novel scientific work; namely, how did different communities, from theoretical physicists to newspaper journalists, decide that Einstein's theory was one of gravitation, applicable to the universe as a whole, and revolutionary?  Molvig is on leave for the coming academic year. 

 

 

 

PETER LAKE, PhD Cambridge (1978)
Peter Lake, a scholar of early modern British religion, politics, and culture, joins Vanderbilt as University Professor following 15 years on the faculty at Princeton.  Professor Lake is the author of numerous books and articles, most recently The Anti-Christ`s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England and The Boxmaker's Revenge: `Orthodoxy,' `Heterodoxy,' and the Politics of the Parish in Early Stuart London.  He is currently working on a number of projects, among them a book (with Richard Cust) on the political culture of the English gentry and the outbreak of the civil war, centered on a case study of Cheshire from the late 1620s to the outbreak, and (with Michael Questier) what might be termed "the catholic counterfactuals" of Elizabeth reign, moments when a variety of marriages and dynastic shifts threatened, if not to overturn then certainly fundamentally to realign the religio-political make-up of the regime.

Professor Lake will be offering an undergraduate seminar, HIST 294 02 Shakespeare's Histories and History in Fall 2008, and in Spring 2009, he will be offering a graduate seminar in Topics in European history: Readings in early modern religion, politics, and an undergraduate course in Early Modern Britain history. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Copyright ©2007 Vanderbilt University