AHR Interview

In this episode of AHR Interview, journal editor Alex Lichtenstein speaks with Max Bergholz, the author of a reappraisal article on Benedict Anderson's 1983 book Imagined Communities that appears in the April 2018 issue of the AHR. Bergholz is Associate Professor of History and holds the James M. Stanford Professorship in Genocide and Human Rights Studies at Concordia University. His 2016 book Violence as a Generative Force: Identity, Nationalism, and Memory in a Balkan Community received numerous prizes, including the 2017 Herbert Baxter Adams Prize from the American Historical Association. Reappraisals are a new category of AHR article that revisit, going back twenty-five years or more, important historical works that have had notable influence on historians and historiography. The first of these was written by Cambridge medieval historian John Arnold and revisits the 1987 book Formation of a Persecuting Society by R. I. Moore. It appeared in the February 2018 issue of the journal.

In this episode of AHR Interview, we speak with Kellen Funk and Lincoln Mullen, the coauthors of an article that appears in the February 2018 issue of the AHR titled, "The Spine of American Law: Digital Text Analysis and U.S. Legal Practice." Using archival research and extensive digital text analysis, the authors track the influence of the Field Code, an important New York code of civil procedure enacted in 1848, on the development of 19-century US state law. Kellen Funk has a degree from Yale Law School and is currently a PhD candidate in history at Princeton University. Lincoln Mullen is Assistant Professor of History at George Mason University and researches primarily American religious history but also works extensively on digital historical projects. They spoke with AHR associate editor Konstantin Dierks at this year's AHA national conference in Washington, DC, about how they came to collaborate on this piece and how both the legal and the digital aspects of the topic speak to a historical audience.

Our guest in this episode is Vanessa Ogle. Ogle is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of the 2015 book The Global Transformation of Time: 1870–1950. She is currently researching the topic of tax havens and offshore finance, and a portion of that research appears as an article in the December 2017 issue of the AHR. Its title is "Archipelago Capitalism: Tax Havens, Offshore Money, and the State, 1950s–1970s." She speaks with AHR associate editor Konstantin Dierks. You can find Ogle's article at https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/122.5.1431.

In this episode of AHR Interview, our guest is University of Michigan historian and recent MacArthur Fellowship recipient Derek Peterson. Peterson's research focuses on the colonial experience in eastern Africa with a particular focus on the various intellectual cultures that developed through this period. He is the author of the 2004 book Creative Writing: Translation, Bookkeeping, and the Work of Imagination in Colonial Kenya and the awarding-winning 2012 book Ethnic Patriotism and the East African Revival: A History of Dissent. He speaks with Indiana University professor Michelle Moyd, whose own research likewise focuses on eastern Africa.

In this episode we speak with Sunil Amrith, Mehra Family Professor of South Asian Studies and Professor of History at Harvard University. He is the author of the 2006 book Decolonizing International Health: South and Southeast Asia, 1930-1965 and the 2011 book Migration and Diaspora in Modern Asia. His most recent book, published in 2013, is Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants. Amrith speaks with Pedro Machado who is Associate Professor of History at Indiana University and whose own work focuses on the history of social and commercial connections between western India and southeastern Africa. Their conversation explores Amrith's most recent book as well as what his recent award might mean for his future research. They begin by discussing Amrith's AHR article, "Tamil Diasporas across the Bay of Bengal," which appeared in the June 2009 issue. Read Amrith's article in the AHR: https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.114.3.547 Listeners may also be interested in the December 2016 AHR forum on Amitav Ghosh's "Ibis Trilogy": https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/121.5.1521

In this AHR Interview, we speak with Elizabeth Hinton, Assistant Professor of History and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, about the broad field of carceral studies and the role of activism for scholars of carceral history. Hinton's 2016 book, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America, has been reviewed widely, including in the June 2017 issue of the AHR, and was placed on the list of 100 notable books of 2016 by the New York Times. Hinton speaks with AHR editorial assistant Charlene Fletcher, who is herself completing a dissertation that addresses carceral questions. Before commencing her doctoral studies in history, Fletcher taught criminal justice at the City University of New York and worked on prisoner reentry initiatives for the New York Prison System. The AHR review of Hinton's book, "From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America," is available here: https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/122/3/795/3862795/Elizabeth-Hinton-From-the-War-on-Poverty-to-the?redirectedFrom=fulltext

In this pilot episode of AHR Interview, a production of the American Historical Review, intern Clay Catlin speaks with Sven Beckert about his article "American Danger: United States Empire, Eurafrica, and the Territorialization of Industrial Capitalism, 1870–1950," which appears in the journal's October 2017 issue. Beckert is Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University. He is the author of the 2001 book The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie and the 2014 book Empire of Cotton: A Global History, which won the Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Most recently he served as coeditor for the 2016 volume Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development. Read the article at https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/122/4/1137/4320241/American-Danger-United-States-Empire-Eurafrica-and?redirectedFrom=fulltext