Faculty

Profile

I am an Associate Professor of History at the New School for Social Research. I am a proponent of a critical history and view historicization as an instrument for rethinking and reimagining the world against convention and expectation; a mode of discovery, reframing, and estranging that is inherently political. Indeed, politics has been my recurrent subject matter, and “culture” (broadly conceived to include literature, knowledge, science, memory, performance, and communication) my preferred entry point for analysis, critique, and teaching.

My fields of interest include US history (especially the nineteenth century), American presence abroad, modern British history, knowledge and its transmission, radicalism and its culture, social history, comparative history, history of the state, memory and commemoration, and history of the book. My recently published book, States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth Century Britain and the United States, explores the early roots of the modern informational states.

I am now engaged in a transnational study that follows the social, cultural and political relationship between the US and Israel at the turn of the 1970s. My new book on this is Coca-Cola, Black Panthers, and Phantom Jets: Israel in the American Orbit, 1967-1973 (Stanford University Press, July 2024)

Degrees Held

PhD 1998, University of California, Berkeley

Recent Publications

Coca-Cola, Black Panthers, and Phantom Jets: Israel in the American Orbit, 1967-1973 (Stanford University Press, July 2024)

"Your Part in the Phantom: American Technology, National Identity, and the War of Attrition,” Israel Studies Vol. 24, No. 1 (Spring 2019), 174-199.

"The 9/11 Commission Report: History Under the Sign of Memory,” in The Palgrave Handbook of State-Sponsored History After 1945, eds. Berber Bevernage and Nico Wouters (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 653-668.

"Vulnerable Populations, Social Investigations, and Epistemic Justice in Early Victorian Britain," Oñati Socio-Legal Studies (2017).

“Instructing the Liberal Subject: Facts and Voice in Victorian Blue Books,” History of Universities (2013).

“The Politics of the Radical Analogy: the Case of the Israeli Black Panthers,” in Nico Slate, ed. Black Power Beyond Borders (Palgrave, 2012).

"Hard Facts for Hard Times: Social Knowledge and Crisis in the Nineteenth Century," Common-Place (2010).

“The State Between Orality and Textuality: Government Reports as ‘Orature’” in Cultural Narratives: Textuality and Performance in the United States before 1990, ed. Sandra M. Gustafson and Caroline Sloat (Notre Dame University Press, 2009).

“What’s in a Name? The Black Panthers in Israel,” The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture (2008).

States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth Century Britain and the United States (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).

“Blue Books and the Victorian Reader,” Victorian Studies (2004).

“The Predicament of Racial Knowledge: Government Studying the Freedmen During the Civil War,” Social Research (Spring 2003).

Research Interests

Social and political history of 19th-century U.S., Victorian Britain, American Empire, race, media and print culture, reform, state formation, and historiography.

Awards And Honors

Postdoctoral Scholar in the Michigan Society of Fellows (1998-2001).

Reinhard Bendix Research Fellowship for Social and Political Thought (1997-98).

The Allan Sharlin Memorial Award (1997-98).

John L. Simpson Memorial Research Fellowship in International and Comparative Studies (1997-98).

Fellow of the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities, UC Berkeley (1996-97).

Mabelle McLeod Lewis Memorial Fund Dissertation Fellowship (1996-97).

International Dissertation Research Fellow of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) - Western Europe Program (1995-96).

The Smithsonian Institution Predoctoral Fellowship (1994-95).

Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of the Massachusetts Historical Society (1994-95).