Current dissertations
Chair or co-chair
Sonya Schoenberger, Seabed Sovereignties: Decolonization, Deep Sea Minerals, and International Law in Oceania (co-chair J. P. Daughton)
Aliyah Dunn-Salahuddin, This Land Was Made for You, Not Me (co-chair Allyson Hobbs)
Kyle Harmse, Engineering the Counter-Revolution: Apartheid South Africa’s military-industrial complex
Committee
Alina Bykova, Extraction Islands: Environment, Politics, and Security on Svalbard, 1850s-present
Caryce Chepchirchir Tirop, Running the Nation: Kenyan Bodies and Postcolonial Entanglements
Jaime Landinez Aceros, Bioenthusiasm: Science and the Remaking of Nature in Post-Conflict Colombia
Completed dissertations
Chair or co-chair
Daniel Williford, Concrete Futures: Technologies of Urban Crisis in Colonial and Postcolonial Morocco. (Department of History, University of Michigan, 2020). Assistant Professor, History, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Kevin Donovan, Scaling Sovereignty: Frontiers and Futures in Postwar East Africa (Program in Anthropology and History, University of Michigan, 2018; co-chair Jatin Dua). Forthcoming as Money, Value, and the State: Sovereignty & Citizenship in East Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2024). Lecturer, African Studies and International Development, University of Edinburgh, Scotland.
Emma Park, Infrastructural Attachments: Technologies, Mobility, and the Tensions of “Home” in Colonial and Postcolonial Kenya (Department of History, University of Michigan, 2017; co-chair Derek Peterson). Forthcoming as Infrastructural Attachments: Technologies, Mobility, and the Tensions of Home in Colonial and Postcolonial Kenya (Duke University Press, 2024). Assistant Professor, History, The New School.
Tasha Rijke-Epstein, Ecologies of Belonging: Techniques of Place-Making, Competing Moral Economies, and Urban Becoming in Mahajanga, Madagascar, 1890s to present (Program in Anthropology and History, University of Michigan, 2017; co-chair Gillian Feeley-Harnik). Published as Children of the Soil: The Power of Built Form in Urban Madagascar (Duke University Press, 2023). Assistant Professor, History, Vanderbilt University.
Robyn d’Avignon, Subterranean Histories: Making ‘Artisanal’ Miners on the West African Sahel. (Program in Anthropology and History, University of Michigan, 2016). Published as A Ritual Geology: Gold and Subterranean Knowledge in Savanna West Africa (Duke University Press, 2022). Associate Professor, History, New York University.
Davide Orsini, Life in the Nuclear Archipelago: Cold War Technopolitics and U.S. nuclear submarines in Italy (Program in Anthropology and History, University of Michigan, 2015; co-chair Stuart Kirsch). Published as The Atomic Archipelago: US Nuclear Submarines and Technopolitics of Risk in Cold War Italy (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022). Fellow, Rachel Carson Center, Münich, Germany.
Kenneth Garner, Seeing Is Knowing: ‘Objectivity’ and the Creation of Visual Culture in France, 1870-1930 (Department of History, University of Michigan, 2012; co-chair Joshua Cole).
Stephen Sparks, Apartheid Modern: SASOL and the making of a South African company town, 1950-2009 (Program in Anthropology and History, University of Michigan, 2011). Senior lecturer, Department of History, University of Johannesburg, South Africa.
Pete Soppelsa, The Fragility of Modernity: Infrastructure and Everyday Life in Paris, 1870-1914 (Department of History, University of Michigan, 2009; co-chair Joshua Cole). Forthcoming as The Fragility of Urban Modernity: Living with Infrastructure in Paris, 1870-1914 (University of Minnesota Press, 2024). Assistant Professor, History, University of Oklahoma.
C. Chakanetsa Mavhunga, The Mobile Workshop: Science, Technology, and Wildlife Use in the Trans-Limpopo Basin, Southern Africa, 1870-Present (Department of History, University of Michigan, 2008). Published as Transient Workspaces: Technologies of Everyday Innovation in Zimbabwe (MIT Press, 2014). Professor, Science and Technology Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Toby Craig Jones, The dogma of development: Technopolitics and the making of Saudi Arabia, 1950-1980 (Department of History, Stanford University, 2006; co-chair Joel Beinin). Published as Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia (Harvard University Press, 2011). Associate Professor, History, Rutgers University.
Sara B. Pritchard, Recreating the Rhône: Nature and technology in France since World War II (Department of History, Stanford University, 2001; co-chair Richard White). Published as Confluence: The Nature of Technology and the Remaking of the Rhône (Harvard University Press, 2011). Associate Professor, Science and Technology Studies, Cornell University.
Committees
Wallace Teska, Paths to Justice: Environment, Religion, and Social Change in French West Africa, 1850-1960 (Department of History, Stanford University, 2024).
Jasmine Reid, Dwelling in Displacement: Land Rights and Heritage Activism in Post-Apartheid Johannesburg (Department of Anthropology, Stanford University, 2022).
Dean Chahim, Draining the Infinite Metropolis: Engineering and the Mundanity of Disaster in Mexico City (Department of Anthropology, Stanford University, 2021). Assistant Professor, New York University.
Rebecca Gruskin, Phosphates: Local Dissidence, Global Agriculture, and Environment in Gafsa, Tunisia, 1890s-1960s (Department of History, Stanford University, 2021).
Rebecca Wall, The Rebellious River: Transnational Senegal River Basin Management, 1919- 2000 (Department of History, Stanford University, 2020). Assistant Professor, Loyola Marymount University.
Nick Caverly, Restructured City: Demolition and Racial Accumulations in Detroit (Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan, 2020). Assistant Professor, University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
Osei Boakye, Beggar Nation: An Examination of Ghana’s Political Economic History, 1946-1976 (Department of History, Stanford University, 2020).
David Benjamin Burns, The Material-Media Histories of Maralinga (Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths-London, 2020).
Rachael Hill, Scientists, Healers, and Bioprospectors: The Epistemological Politics of Therapeutic Pluralism in Ethiopia, 1930-1998 (Department of History, Stanford University, 2019). Assistant Professor, Cal Poly Pomona.
Stephanie Quinn, Claiming a ‘Land of Milk and Honey’: Labor, Urbanization, and Political Imagination in Namibia, 1945-1994 (Department of History, Stanford University, 2019).
Marie Ghis Malfilatre, Santé sous-traitée: Ethnographier les mobilisations contre les risques du travail dans l’industrie nucléaire en France, 1968-2018 (École doctorale, spécialité sociologie, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2018).
Leny Patinaux, Enfouir des déchets nucléaires dans un monde conflictuel. Une histoire de la démonstration de sûreté de projets de stockage géologique en France, 1982-2013. (Sciences, savoirs, techniques : histoire et société, Centre Alexandre Koyré, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2017).
Aro Velmet, Pasteur’s Empire: French Expertise, Colonialism, and Transnational Science, 1890-1945 (Department of History, New York University, 2017, with distinction). Associate Professor, History, University of Southern California.
Dan Hirschman, The Emergence of the Economy as an Object of Knowledge (Department of Sociology, University of Michigan, 2016). Associate Professor, Cornell University.
Hilde Reinertsen, Powering Global Development? The Evolution of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation of Norway’s Development Aid to the Energy Sector, 1980-2010 (Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Oslo, 2016; primary supervisor Kristin Asdal).
Basak Saraç Lesavre, Formulating Nuclear Values: Communities, Equations, Budgets and Debates with Nuclear Waste (Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation, Mines ParisTech, 2015).
Sarah Hamilton, From Modernization to Europeanization: Environmental Policy and Philosophy in Spain, 1900-2000 (Department of History, University of Michigan, 2013). Associate Professor, University of Bergen, Norway.
Joshua Grace, Modernization Bubu: Cars, Roads, and the Politics of Development in Tanzania, 1870s to 1980s, (Department of History, Michigan State University, 2013). Associate Professor, University of South Carolina.
Douglas Andrew Kolozsvari, Civil Society Organizations and the Protection of Sub-Saharan Africa’s Colonial Railways (Urban and Regional Planning Program, University of Michigan, 2013).
Lydie Cabane, Gouverner les catastrophes : politiques, savoirs et organisation de la gestion des (risques) de catastrophes en Afrique du Sud (Sociologie de l’action, Sciences Po, 2012).
Bridget Lauren Guarasci, Reconstructing Life: Environment, Expertise, and Political Power in Iraq’s Southern Marshes 2003-2007 (Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan, 2010).
Sezin Topçu, L’agir contestataire à l’épreuve de l’atome. Critique et gouvernement de la critique dans l’histoire de l’énergie nucléaire en France, 1968-2008. (Spécialité Histoire des sciences et des techniques, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2010).
Samuel Temple, Mountain, Moor and Marsh: The Politics of Environmental Transformation in Southern France, 1850-1950 (Department of History, University of Michigan, 2010).
Chandra D. Bhimull, Empire in the Air: Speed, Perception and Airline Travel in the Atlantic World (Program in Anthropology and History, University of Michigan, 2007). Audrey Wade Hittinger Katz and Sheldon Toby Katz Associate Professor for Distinguished Teaching in Anthropology and African-American Studies, Colby College.
Marina Welker, Global capitalism and the “caring corporation”: Mining and the corporate social responsibility movement in Indonesia and Denver (Program in Anthropology and History, University of Michigan, 2006). Associate Professor, Cornell University.
Katherine Jenny Worboys, Lessons from a catastrophe: The emergence of new social and political actors in post-dictatorship Argentina, 1984-2004 (Program in Anthropology and History, University of Michigan, 2005).
Andrew M. Goss, The Floracrats: Civil science, bureaucracy, and institutional authority in the Netherlands East Indies and Indonesia, 1840-1970 (Department of History, University of Michigan, 2004). Currently Professor, Augusta University.
Carlos Martín, Riveting: Steel technology, building codes, and the production of modern places (Department of Civil Engineering, Stanford University, 1999).
David Adam Kirsch, The electric car and the burden of history: Studies in automotive systems rivalry in America, 1890-1996 (Department of History, Stanford University, 1997). Associate Professor, University of Maryland.