Skip over navigation
Brown shield Brown shield Brown University Brown shield Brown shield Brown University History Department at Brown University

Visiting and Affiliated Faculty, 2011-2012

  • Shiva Balaghi is a historian of the modern Middle East, with special interests in the interrelated histories of colonialism, nationalism, gender, and visual culture. As a Postdoctoral Fellow in International Humanities at the Cogut Center for the Humanities (2009-12), she will be completing a book on the cultural history of Iran from the mid-nineteenth century through the present. She is the Vice-President of the American Institute of Iranian Studies and an editor of MERIP. Her publications include Reconstructing Gender in the Middle East (co-edited, 1994), Picturing Iran: Art, Society, and Revolution (co-edited, 2002), and Saddam Hussein: A Biography (2005). She has published numerous articles on Iranian intellectual history and visual culture, and her writing has been translated into Chinese, Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. She has taught History and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, the University of Vermont, and New York University.
  • Zoltán Biedermann, Visiting Assistant Professor of History and Portuguese & Brazilian Studies (Spring 2012) received his PhD from the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris and the Universidade Nova in Lisbon. He is a historian of the Portuguese Empire, with a focus on Asia in the early modern period. His main interest is in early imperial encounters, ideas of conquest and the representation and organization of space in maps and texts. Besides his core work on the Portuguese in Sri Lanka, South Arabia and the Persian Gulf, he has published on subjects including diplomacy, cartography, urbanism and religious missions. He was an associate researcher at the Center for Overseas History in Lisbon from 1999 to 2008, to which he remains attached. Between 2003 and 2006 he coordinated the international research project Historical Atlas of the Persian Gulf at the EPHE in Paris. In 2006-07 he was an Ahmanson-Getty fellow at the UCLA’s William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. Since 2006 he has also beena co-editor of the Maritime Asia series published by Harrassowitz Verlag in Germany. He has been a Lecturer at Birkbeck College, University of London, since 2009. Publications include Soqotra: Geschichte einer ehemals christlichen Insel im Indischen Ozean (2006) and the Historical Atlas of the Persian Gulf (2006). He is currently working on a book entitled Mutual Conquests: Sri Lanka and the Making of Iberian Imperialism in Asia, 1500-1600.
  • Palmira Brummett, Visiting Professor 2011-2015, received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in Middle Eastern History and Islamic Studies. She is a historian of the Ottoman empire and the Mediterranean world whose work focuses on the rhetorics and genres of cross-cultural encounter. Current projects include completing a monograph on early modern mapping of the Ottoman empire in text and image, and launching another on the flow of culture, information, and people in the early modern Ottoman Adriatic. In classes ranging from The Ottomans and Europe, to Women in the Islamic Middle East, to The U.S. and the Middle East: Image and Imperialism, she explores textual and visual imagery to examine the layering of history, and the ways in which peoples envision themselves and their neighbors (near and distant). Her published work includes Image and Imperialism in the Ottoman Revolutionary Press, 1908-1911, S.U.N.Y. Press, 2000; Ottoman Seapower and Levantine Diplomacy in the Age of Discovery, S.U.N.Y. Press, 1994; an edited volume, The ‘Book’ of Travels: Genre, Ethnology and Pilgrimage, 1250-1700, Brill, 2009; multiple publications in the field of world history; and numerous articles.

  • David Gordon, Visiting Associate Professor Spring 2012, received his B.A. from the University of Cape Town, South Africa and his Ph.D. from Princeton University. He has taught at a variety of universities in South Africa and in the USA, and presently teaches at Bowdoin College. His research and publications focus on the history of southern and central Africa over the last two centuries. They reflect interests that include the influence of Atlantic and Indian Ocean trading networks, British and Belgian colonialism, changing property regimes, environmental cultures, the historical imagination, and spiritual agency. His most recent book, a history of how spiritual beliefs have influenced human agency, is entitled Invisible Agents: Spirits in a Central African History, and will be published by Ohio University Press in 2012. He has also edited a collection with Shepard Krech entitled Indigenous Knowledge and the Environment in Africa and North America (Ohio University Press, 2012). His first book, a history of changing tenure rules and forms of wealth from the pre-colonial to the post-colonial periods in the borderlands of Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nachituti’s Gift: Economy, Society and Environment in Central Africa, was published by the University of Wisconsin Press, and was a finalist for the Herskovits award for the best book in all disciplines of African Studies.He has published articles in numerous scholarly journals, including the Journal for African History, Journal of Southern African Studies, William and Mary Quarterly, and Comparative Studies in Society and History. Professor Gordon teaches a variety of classes in which he shares his fascination for the history of Africa and confronts the challenging ethical, political and methodological issues faced by students of African history.

  • Konstantinos Kornetis is Visiting Assistant Professor of Modern Greek and Balkan History (2009-12). His research interests include the history of European authoritarian regimes and social movements in the 20th century, political cinema, as well as the analysis of oral testimonies. He holds a BA from the Universities of Munich (LMU) and King's College London, an MA degree in Balkan History from the School of Slavonic Studies in London and a PhD in History and Civilization from the European University Institute of Florence. He has spent research periods in Madrid, Paris and New York and has worked extensively on the history and memory of the 1960s, the methodology of oral history and the use of film as a source for social and cultural history. His most recent publication is in "1968 in Europe" (Palgrave 2008), edited by Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth. He is currently revising for publication his thesis on the Greek and Spanish student movements under the regimes of the Colonels and Franco.
  • Jane Lancaster, Visiting Assistant Professor 2009-14 , received her PhD in history from Brown University. Interested in women and gender she has published a biography: Making Time, Lillian Moller Gilbreth, a Life Beyond Cheaper by the Dozen (Northeastern, 2004), which won a Popular Culture Association book prize; an institutional history: Inquire Within: A Social History of the Providence Athenaeum Since 1753 (2003), and an annotated edition of Emily Post’s only travel book By Motor to the Golden Gate (McFarland 2005). She has also published many articles on local history, including work on African American activists and artists, Victorian gymnasts, militiamen and philanthropic organizations. Her work on a group of teenage girl diarists from the Early Republic led to an award from the American Association for State and Local History. She is currently completing a biography of the notorious Madame Jumel, and writing a new history of Brown University.
  • Stephen Lassonde, Deputy Dean of the College and Adjunct Assistant Professor of History, received his Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale in 1994. He has taught courses on the history of childhood, education, and family life in North America, on family life and sexuality in the postwar United States, and on U.S. urban policy. He is associate editor of Children and Childhood: In History and Society, a three-volume encyclopedia of the history of childhood (2004) and author of Learning to Forget: Schooling and Family Life in New Haven's Working Class, 1870-1940 (Yale 2005). He is currently collaborating with a child psychiatrist on a cultural history of a longitudinal study that examines the lives of several children growing up during the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. He recently contributed a chapter to a book on childhood in the United States since 1945, and is writing a history of children's perceptions of authority in the United States over the course of the 20th century.
  • Paul Lucier, Visiting Assistant Professor 2011-2012, is a historian of American science, technology, and the environment.  His research focuses on developing methods for understanding the interplay between science and capitalism and the repercussions of those relations for the production of knowledge, the development of industry, and the shaping of landscapes.  He has examined these important topics from several new angles, including prize-winning articles on the funding of scientific work and on the legal and philosophical differences (if any) between scientific discoveries and technological inventions.  He has also published studies on the evolution of scientific and engineering disciplines, on the rise of professionals and experts, on the enduring ethical challenges raised by doing research for money, and on the industrial landscapes left by science-based mining.  In his book, Scientists and Swindlers: Consulting on Coal and Oil in America, 1820-1890 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) he explored many of these themes in a narrative about the multiple ways in which geologists and chemists became involved in and influenced by the exploration and extraction of petroleum and coal.  The book also treats the engagement of men of science and practical men in the manufacturing of gas lighting and lamp oils (i.e., kerosene) -- the new "technological" industries of the mid-nineteenth century.  He is currently researching the role of science and engineering in the development of hard rock mining - gold, silver, and copper - in the American West during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  Paul Lucier studied geophysics at Texas A&M and received his PhD in history from Princeton University.  He has taught at Birkbeck College, University of London, University of Sussex, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and his research has been funded by the Dibner Institute, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Science Foundation.
  • Elizabeth Meloy, Visiting Assistant Professor, completed her Ph.D. from Brown in July 2011. Her dissertation, “Irish Landscape and Memory in the Wake of the Great Famine, 1845-1860,” uses representations of the region of the ‘West of Ireland’ as a guide to explore the ways in which Dublin’s Anglo-Irish and Catholic middle-classes struggled to make sense of the catastrophe in its immediate aftermath. Her current project extends the dissertation, examining cultural memories of the Famine in early twentieth-century Ireland. She has held visiting positions at Brown and Wellesley College and taught a variety of courses in modern European and Irish history.
  • Jeremy Ravi Mumford, Visiting Assistant Professor, works on the
    history of colonial Latin America and the comparative history of
    Native Americans. After earning his Ph.D. from Yale he held a Mellon
    postdoctoral fellowship at Brandeis University, was a junior fellow in
    the Michigan Society of Fellows, and was assistant professor of
    History at the University of Mississippi. He has published on topics
    in indigenous people's history in the Andes, the United States and
    Canada, from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries, in
    journals such as the Hispanic American Historical Review, the Latin
    American Research Review, the Canadian Historical Review, and the
    Boston Globe. His book, "Vertical Empire: The General Resettlement of
    Indians in the Colonial Andes," is due out from Duke University Press
    in Fall 2012.
  • Laura D. Phillips (Ph.D., History, University of Virginia, 2011) is a US historian specializing in post-Civil War political, legal, and intellectual history. Her current scholarship focuses primarily on the legal and economic development of US competition policy from the passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 through the New Deal era.  Her dissertation, “The American Fair Trade Controversy: Law and Economics in Transition, 1890-1940,” argues that the history of American capitalism cannot be explained solely as the ascendancy of corporate consolidation and the lowest-cost consumption model. Groups like the American Fair Trade League insisted that cooperative associations coupled with government oversight might provide a more equitable system for competitors and consumers alike.  Her research more generally blends legal theory, the history of economic thought, and business history to explain the emergence of various types of regulation—both seen and unseen.  
  • Derek Seidman, Visiting Assistant Professor 2011-2012, received his Ph.D. in History from Brown University in May 2010. His dissertation, “The Unquiet Americans: GI Dissent during the Vietnam War,” examines the history of active-duty soldier protest during the late Vietnam era. His research and teaching interests lie in modern U.S. social, cultural and political history – particularly the history of social and political movements. He is also interested in political economy, labor and working-class history, and U.S. foreign relations. He believes that the study of history equips students to live deeper, more meaningful lives, and is essential for making sense of the contemporary world. In his teaching, he aims to help students understand how people, when organized and mobilized, have impacted history, as well as how peoples’ lives have been shaped and constrained by larger political and structural realities. Seidman was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Trinity College during the 2010-2011 academic year. At Brown, he will be teaching courses on the Vietnam War and U.S. social movements.