Education

PhD, United States History, University of California, Berkeley, 2011
BA, Modern History, King's College, Cambridge University, 2004
BA, History and Philosophy, Columbia College, Columbia University, 2002

Employment

I am currently a research scholar at Columbia University's Committee on Global Thought. In the fall of 2012 I will join Northwestern University's department of history as an assistant professor.

Research interests

My research has centered around three themes: the history of the United States in the world, intellectual history, and the history of capitalism. In addition, I am interested in the methodological aspects of teaching and writing history. My dissertation was entitled "Quests for Community: The United States, Community Development, and the World, 1935-1965" and is now being revised as a book manuscript. I am also working on a second project about U.S. power in the Pacific, particularly in relation to its territories and occupied zones, in the 1940s.

Research publications

"Polanyi in the United States: Peter Drucker, Karl Polanyi, and the Midcentury Critique of Economic Society," Journal of the History of Ideas 70 (2009): 445-466. A Japanese translation of this article has been published in Gendai shiso 38 (2010): 141-159.

"The Fact/Narrative Distinction and Student Examinations in History," The History Teacher 41 (2008): 199-206 (click here for preprint).

"Caste or Colony?: Indianizing Race in the United States," Modern Intellectual History 4 (2007): 275-301.

"The Politics of Architecture and Urbanism in Postcolonial Lagos, 1960-1986," Journal of African Cultural Studies 19 (2007): 165-186 (click here for preprint).

"History and the Sciences," co-authored with Philip Kitcher, in Action, Art, History: Engagements with Arthur Danto, ed. Daniel Herwitz and Michael Kelly (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 198-226. To be reprinted in Explanation in the Special Sciences: The Case of Biology and History, ed. Andreas Hutterman, Oliver Scholz, and Marie I. Kaiser (New York: Springer, forthcoming).

Reviews and other writing

Review of Foundations of the American Century: The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations in the Rise of American Power, by Inderjeet Parmar, forthcoming in n+1.

"Modernization and Development in U.S. Foreign Relations," review essay, forthcoming in Passport: The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Review.

Review of Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India, by Nico Slate, forthcoming in the Journal of Social History.

Joint review of The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order, by David Ekbladh, and The Hungry World: America's Cold War Battle against Poverty in Cold War Asia, by Nick Cullather, Agricultural History 86 (2012): 106-108.

Review of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of An American Original, by Robin D. G. Kelley, The Sixties 3 (2010): 247-249 (click here for preprint).

"On B. R. Ambedkar and Black-Dalit Connections," 2008: a short memorandum describing some of the connections between Dalit leader B. R. Ambedkar and African Americans, meant as a supplement to the material contained in "Caste or Colony?" A Telugu translation has been published in Bahujana Keratalu, April 2012, 31-32.

Teaching

I am currently teaching a graduate seminar on the history of international development. I have also taught and worked as a teaching assistant for numerous courses in history, American Studies, and philosophy at UC Berkeley and San Quentin State Prison (via the Prison University Project). One course whose syllabus is online is my senior seminar in U.S. intellectual history. I have also worked for the UC Berkeley History-Social Studies Project and the Stanford History Education Group on bringing academic knowledge into the high-school classroom.

Other projects

My website, The Books of the Century, lists bestsellers, Book-of-the-Month Club selections, and other notable books for every year of the twentieth century. The New Yorker (well, one of the magazine's blogs) called it "a brilliant blend of aggregation and curation."

I designed a series of grade calculators and rosters that students can use to find and predict their grades and teachers can use to record and calculate course averages.

A copy of my CV is available here.