People > New Faculty as of 2007

Allyson Hobbs is an assistant professor of American history.  She received a B.A. from Harvard and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.  Her doctoral dissertation examined the phenomenon of racial passing in the United States from the moment when passing became a problem in the late eighteenth century to the moment when it reportedly “passed out” in the 1950s.  Her study makes an effort to better understand African American group identity and racial affinity, in all of its various formations and multiple expressions, by bringing into focus those who disclaimed it.  She focuses on 19th- and early 20th-century American history and African American social and cultural history.  Her research interests include racial mixture, migration and urbanization, and the intersections of race, class and gender.

Aishwary Kumar joined the Department in 2007. He finished his PhD in 2006 at the University of Cambridge on the moral genealogies of the ‘tribal’ and the possibility of the anti-archive in 19th and 20th century eastern India. He was Rouse Ball Fellow in History at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 2006 to 2007. Kumar’s fundamental concern is with the disruption and transformation of liberal thought by aboriginal politics. His research explores the character of what he calls the ‘ironic’, ‘romantic’ and ‘rogue’ narratives of subaltern refusal mounted against the colonial-nationalist contract of friendship; and seeks to unpack the relationship between writing, fidelity, and community. His engagement with religion and ethics extends this inquiry further into ideas of freedom, sacrifice and responsibility as these have shaped the moral reflexes in modern South Asian political thought. Kumar’s current work charts the itinerary of political theory and conceptual practices travelling between South Asia and Europe.

Laura Stokes completed her Ph.D. at the University of Virginia in 2006. Her dissertation, "Demons of Urban Reform," examines the origins of witchcraft prosecution in fifteenth-century Europe against the backdrop of a general rise in the prosecution of crime and other measures of social control. In the process she has investigated the relationship between witchcraft and sodomy persecutions as well as the interplay between the unregulated development of judicial torture and innovations within witchcraft prosecution. She is currently in the process of revising the dissertation into a book manuscript. Her future research plans include a social history of greed in the age of the Reformation.

New Faculty as of 2006

Yumi Moon joined the department in 2006 after she completed her Ph.D. at Harvard University in November 2005. Her dissertation revisited the identity of the pro-Japanese collaborators, called the Ilchinhoe, and highlighted the tensions between their populist orientation and the state-centered approach of the Japanese colonizers between 1896 and 1910. She is currently working on a book manuscript centered on the theme of collaboration and empire, notably in relation to the recent revisionist assessments of empire. Her next research will extend to the colonial period of Korea after the annexation in 1910 and will examine what constituted colonial modernity in people’s everyday lives and whether the particulars of modernity were different in colonial and non-colonial situations. To explore these questions, she plans to look at the history of movie theaters in East Asia between 1890 and 1945, a subject which will allow her to study the interactions between the colonial authority, capitalists and consumers, as well as to look at the circulation of movies as consumed texts.

Thomas S. Mullaney joined the department in 2006 as Assistant Professor in Modern Chinese History after completing his Ph.D. at Columbia University. Mullaney's research examines the complex historical and sociological processes that connect the production of modern social scientific knowledge to the production of modern state power. His research deals with the role of the social sciences in the history of state- and nation-formation, ethnic and racial identity, state and social scientific practices of individual and collective identification, classification theory, and transnational and comparative world history.

Jun Uchida completed her Ph.D. at Harvard University in 2005 and spent another year as a junior fellow of the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, before joining the Stanford History Department this fall. She is currently preparing a book manuscript based on her dissertation entitled Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, 1876-1945. Her book will re-examine colonial Korea by applying a new analytical framework of settler colonialism and illustrate the complex dynamics of local engagement among state, settlers, and Koreans. She is also looking at the history of decolonization—not only the dismantling of colonial authority on the Korean peninsula, but a more drawn-out process of repatriation and settlement as well as the politics of memory in postwar Japan.

Last updated Sept. 9, 2008