Paper Archive

2014-2015: States in their Environments

September 19: Yannis Kotsonis, New York University
The State-Society Paradigm in Russian and Soviet History: How the Modern State Taxed Its Population and in the Process Co-opted It
Comment: David Hoffman: History, OSU (Download Paper)

October 31: Chapurukha Kusimba, American University  
Maritime Exchange Networks and Urban-Centered States in Ancient East Africa 
Comment: Dodie McDow, History, OSU (Download Paper)

November 7: Stephen Mihm, University of Georgia
The Standards of the State: Weights, Measures, and Nation Making in the Early American Republic
Comment: John Brooke, History, OSU ((Download Paper)

November 14: John Clark, University of St Andrews, CHR Senior Faculty Fellow
From conservation to environmentalism – state of nature to natural world?
Comment: Chris Otter, OSU History (Download Paper)

December 5: Victor Lieberman, Univ. Michigan 
Why was Nationalism European? Political Ethnicity in Southeast Asia and Europe c. 1450-1850
Comment: Theodora Dragostinova, History, OSU (Download Paper)

January 23: Rebecca Tally, Cornell University, CHR Junior Faculty Fellow
The Politics of Wheat: Economy, Society, and the Colombian State
(Download Paper)

February 20:  Rita Wright, New York University  
Indus Valley and the rise of the early state    
Comment:   Julie Field, Anthropology, OSU (Download Paper)

March 6: Anupama Rao, Barnard College
Remediation, Redress, and Affirmative Action in Comparative Frame: The Connected Histories of Race and Caste  
Comment: Mytheli Sreenivas, History, OSU (Download Paper)

March 27:  Richard Bensel, Cornell University
The Founding of Modern States
Comment:  Inés Valdez, Political Science, OSU (Download Paper)

April 10: Annabel Brett, University of Cambridge 
The Space of Politics and the Space of War in Early Modern Natural Jurisprudence 
Comment: Benjamin McKean, Political Science, OSU (No paper available.)

Closing keynote lecture:
April 17: Quentin Skinner, Queen Mary University of London

The State’s Three Bodies
Introduction and series closing comment: Greg Anderson (No paper available.)


2013-2014: “The State as Idea and Practice.”

April 11: Greg Downs, City University of New York
Seminar: Practical Freedom: Space, Sovereignty, and the End of Slavery in the United States
(Download paper)

Mar. 20 Michael Martoccio
Northwestern University, CHR Dissertation Fellow
Seminar: “Cooperation, Capital, and Italian States: AD 1100-1550”
(Download paper)

March 6: CHR Special Event
Deirdre McCloskey, University of Illinois at Chicago
The Great Enrichment: Came and Comes from Ethics and Rhetoric”
(Download paper)

Feb. 28: Josiah Ober, Stanford University
Seminar: “The Economic Rise and Political Fall of Classical Greece”
(Download paper)

January 31: Clifford Ando, University of Chicago 
Seminar: “The ambitions of government: Territoriality and infrastructural power in ancient Rome.” (Download paper)

January 17: Diane King
Junior Faculty Fellow, University of Kentucky

Seminar: “Patriliny and the Modern State in the Middle East and the World” (Download paper)

Jan. 10: Julia Strauss
Senior Faculty Fellow, SOAS, University of London

Seminar: “Repertoires, performances, and institution creation: Comparing Regime Consolidation in China and Taiwan, 1949-1955” (Download paper)

November 22: R. Bin Wong (UCLA)
“The Fiscal State: Modern Norm, General Model, or Historical Type of State?”

Recommended reading for R. Bin Wong’s lecture: R. Bin Wong Download recommended reading: “Taxation and Good Governance in China, 1500-1914,” recently published in The Rise of Fiscal States: A Global History 1500–1914, Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla and Patrick K. O’Brien, eds. (Cambridge University Press, 2012)

November 1: Mark Bevir (University of California-Berkeley)
Seminar: “A New Governance: Hierarchies, Markets, and Networks, c. 1979-2010” (Download paper

October 18: Gary Gerstle (Vanderbilt University)
Seminar: “The Illiberal Tradition in America: The States and Their Police Power, 1790-1920” (Download paper)

October 4: Bob Jessop, University of Lancaster
Seminar: “The State as a Social Relation: Some Implications of the Strategic-Relational Approach” (Download presentation)


Autumn 2012 Seminars: Epidemiology in World History

April 5: Sarah Hodges (University of Warwick)
Biotrash: The Urban Metabolism of Medical Garbage in India (Download paper)

March 1: Matthew Klingle (Bowdoin College)
Sweet Blood: Toward an Environmental History of Diabetes, Chronic Disease, and Race in North America (Download paper)

Feb 15: John Davis (CHR Junior Faculty Fellow)
Geoepidemiology, Chemistry, and Culture: The Environmental Approach to Cholera in Russia, 1892-1905 (Download paper)

Feb 1: Mini-conference on Health and Disease in Africa:

  • Mari Webel, Postdoctoral Fellow in African Studies and Global Health, Emory University
    Gland-feelers, Researchers, and Elusive Patients: Perspectives on Sleeping Sickness Control in East Africa (Download paper)
  • Julie Livingston, Rutgers University
    Neoplastic Africa: Mapping Networks of Toxicity and Knowledge (Download paper)

November 16, 2012: Kirk R. Smith (Professor of Global Environmental Health, UC Berkeley)
Global Warming, Public Health, and Human Futures: Thoughts on Scheffler’s “Afterlife” Thesis

November 2, 2012: Daniel Royles (CHR Dissertation Fellow)
Black Men Loving Black Men is the Revolutionary Act of the 1980s (Download paper

October 19 2012: Mini-conference on Health and Environment in Japan

David Howell, Harvard University
How Green Was My Night Soil: Waste and Environment in Nineteenth-Century Japan (Download paper)

Brett L. Walker, Regents Professor, Montana State University, Bozeman; Professor, College of Science and Engineering, University of Minnesota
The Great Convergence: Dissecting the Nature of Japan’s Historical Ascendency (Download paper

October 5 2012: Natasha Sarkar (CHR Junior Faculty Fellow)
“Plague germs can penetrate the celestial dress, but plague measures cannot”: Mapping Plague Narratives in British India (Download paper)

September 28 2012: Andrew Price Smith (Colorado College)
Climate Change, Disease, and the State: Lessons from History (Download paper)


Spring 2012 Seminars: Epidemiology in World History

May 18 2012: James Webb (Colby College)
Malaria Redux: The History and Ethics of Malaria Eradication and Control Campaigns in Tropical Africa (Download paper)
Comment: Alison Norris, College of Public Health, Ohio State

May 4 2012: Liu Shiyung (Taiwan University, CHR Senior Fellow )
Disease, People, and Environment: The Plague in China (Download paper) (Download presentation)
Comment: Phillip Brown, Department of History, Ohio State

April 20 2012: Marta Hanson (Johns Hopkins University; currently Visiting Fellow, International Consortium for Research in the Humanities, University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany)
Visualizing the Geography of Diseases in China, 1870s-1920s (Download paper) (Download presentation)
Comment: Song Liang, College of Public Health, Ohio State

April 13 2012:
Katherine Arner (Johns Hopkins, CHR Dissertation Fellow)
Fever, Commerce and Diplomacy: Consuls, Commercial Agents and the Transformation of Warm Climate Medicine in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions (Download paper)
Comment: Thomas McDow, Department of History, Ohio State
Cosponsored by the Ohio Seminar in Early American History

April 6 2012:
Nukhet Varlik (Rutgers University)
Plague epidemics in the post-Black Death Mediterranean and the Ottoman Empire (Download paper)
Comment: Carter Findley, Dept. of History, Ohio State

Dec. 2 2011
Kim Bowes (University of Pennsylvania)
Measuring quality of life among Ancient Roman Populations (Download paper)

Nov. 18 2011
Tamara Mann (Columbia University/CHR Dissertation Fellow)
From Pastoral Care to Health Care: The First National Conference on Aging, 1950. (Download paper)

Oct. 28 2011
Clark Larsen & Richard Steckel, The Ohio State University, “Health and Aging in the Very Long Term: An Interim Report of the OSU European and Global Health Projects”

  • Steckel, Rose, Larsen, Walker, Evolutionary Anthropology 2002 (Download paper)
  • Steckel, Larsen, Scuilli, Walker, Human Remains (Download paper)

Oct. 14 2011
Susan Klepp, Temple University, “Culture, the Revolution, and the Beginnings of the American Fertility Transition” (Download paper)