- Julia Stephens
- Assistant Professor of History
- Degree:
Ph.D., Harvard University
- Additional Degree(s):
M.Phil., Trinity College, Cambridge
B.A., Harvard College
- Rutgers :
At Rutgers since 2016
- Specialty:
Colonial and Post-Colonial South Asia: Legal History
- Email:
julia.stephens@rutgers.edu
- Office:
114 Van Dyck Hall
- Phone:
848-932-8261
{Photo credit: Roy Groething}
RESEARCH INTERESTS
My research focuses on how law has shaped religion, family, and economy in colonial and post-colonial South Asia and in the wider Indian diaspora. My first book, entitled Governing Islam: Law, Empire, and Secularism in South Asia, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2018. The book moves between official archives of colonial law and wider spheres of public debates, bringing into conversation vernacular pamphlets and newspapers, Urdu fatwas, colonial legal cases, and legislative deliberations. Drawing on these wide-ranging legal archives, Governing Islam explores how colonial law constructed a new religious/secular binary that was deeply influential, and vibrantly contested inside and outside colonial courts.
I am currently working on a project on inheritance and diasporic Indian families, tentatively entitled Worldly Afterlives: Death and Diaspora in the Indian Ocean. The project traces the lives of Indian migrants—sailors, petty moneylenders, female merchants, and even circus performers—by looking at the assets they left behind after their deaths. These estates ranged from mercantile fortunes to a few treasured personal effects, including letters, jewelry, or a pocketful of receipts for small debts owed by fellow travelers. Relatives in India and abroad struggled to navigate complex international bureaucracies in order to track down information about long-lost relatives and the property they left behind. This archive provides a window into the intersecting histories of diasporic families and the formation of state bureaucracies for managing global flows of labor and capital. In the coming years this research will take me to India, South Africa, Zanzibar, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the United Kingdom.
My teaching includes surveys on modern South Asia and political Islam, and more specialized seminars on Islamic law, postcolonial and subaltern theory, and diasporic family histories. Before coming to Rutgers, I taught at Yale, Cambridge, and Harvard.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
- Governing Islam: Law, Empire, and Secularism in South Asia (Cambridge University, Press, 2018). South Asia Edition, 2019.
- “A Bureaucracy of Rejection: Petitioning and the Impoverished Paternalism of the British-Indian Raj.” Modern Asian Studies 53, no. 1 (January 2019): 177-202.
- “The Past and Future of the Muslim Post-Colonial Moment: Islamic Economy and Social Justice in South Asia.” In The Postcolonial Moment in South and Southeast Asia, edited by Gyan Prakash, Nikhil Menon, and Michael Laffan. London: Bloomsbury, 2018.
- “An Uncertain Inheritance: The Imperial Travels of Legal Migrants, from British India to Ottoman Iraq,” Law and History Review 32.4 (November 2014).
- “The Politics of Muslim Rage: Secular Law and Religious Sentiments in Late-Colonial India,” History Workshop Journal (Spring 2014): 45-64.
- “The Phantom Wahhabi: Liberalism and the Muslim Fanatic in Mid-Victorian India,” Modern Asian Studies 47.1(January 2013): 22-52.
SELECTED GRANTS AND FELLOWSHIPS
- Award for Distinguished Contribution to Undergraduate Education, School of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers University (2019)
- InterAsia Research Fellowship, Social Science Research Council (2016-2017)
- Kempf Memorial Fund, MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, Yale University (2015-2016)
- Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Centre for History and Economics, Cambridge University (2013-2014)
- Sidney R. Knafel Completion Fellowship, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University (2012-2013)
- Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, U.S. Department of Education (2008-2012)
- Johan Mathew
- Assistant Professor of History
- Degree:
Ph.D., Harvard University
- Additional Degree(s):
Diploma in Arabic, School of Oriental and African Studies
(University of London),
B.A. Princeton University
- Rutgers :
At Rutgers since 2016
- Specialty:
Global and Economic History; Indian Ocean
- Email:
johan.mathew@rutgers.edu
- Office:
106 Van Dyck Hall
- Phone:
848-932-8380
RESEARCH INTERESTS
I am a cultural and social historian of the economy with a particular interest in illicit commerce and how it shapes modern capitalism. Geographically, I have focused on the Indian Ocean but I study and teach transnational and global history more generally. Before coming to Rutgers I was jointly appointed in the Departments of History and Economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
My first book, Margins of the Market: Trafficking and Capitalism across the Arabian Sea (University of California Press, 2016), traces the hidden networks that trafficked slaves, guns and gold across the Arabian Sea in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. The book shows how capitalism is constituted by the constant process of distinguishing and delegitimizing certain forms of exchange as trafficking. Connected to this project I have several published and forthcoming articles and chapters on trust, corruption, violence, and diaspora in the Indian Ocean world.
I have now turned my attention to a new project tentatively entitled, “Opiates of the Masses: A History of Humanity in the Time of Capital.” This research explores the consumption of cannabis, opium and other narcotics with particular concern for how and why they are consumed by the working classes in the global south. I’m interested in how these substances allow human bodies to adapt to the demands of an industrial production and the time pressures of a capitalist economy. The project is not concerned with drugs so much as the fraught relationship between capitalist markets and the human experience of pain and pleasure.
COURSES TAUGHT
- 506:102 World History 1500 to the Present
- 506:220 Piracy: A Global History
- 506:299 History Workshop: Slavery and Islam
- 508:292 Pilgrims, Pirates and Poets: Globalization in the Indian Ocean World
- 510:541 Colloquium on Global History: Capitalism and its Discontents (Graduate)
- 090:293 The Political Economy of Piracy (Honors)
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
- Margins of the Market: Trafficking and Capitalism across the Arabian Sea (University of California Press, 2016). Winner of the Ralph Gomory Prize, The Business History Conference; the Roger Owen Book Award (Bi-Annual), Middle East Studies Association; the Middle East Political Economy Prize, The Political Economy Project; and the First Monograph Prize in Economic and Social History (Bi-Annual), The Economic History Society.
- “On Principals and Agency: Reassembling Trust in Indian Ocean Commerce” in Comparative Studies in Society and History (forthcoming, Volume 61, January 2019)
- “Smoke on the Water: Cannabis Smuggling, Corruption and the Janus-Faced Colonial State” in History Workshop Journal (Volume 86, Autumn 2018)
- “Spectres of Pan-Islam: Methodological Nationalism and the Origins of Decolonization” in Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 45, no. 6 (December 2017): 942-968.
- “Sindbad’s Ocean: Reframing the Market in the Middle East,” Roundtable essay in the International Journal of Middle East Studies 48, no. 4 (December 2016): 754-757.
- “Trafficking Labor: Abolition and the Exchange of Labor across the Arabian Sea, 1861-1947” in Slavery & Abolition 33, no. 1, (March 2012): 139-156.
FELLOWSHIPS, GRANTS AND AWARDS
- Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, Faculty Fellow
- Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, John E. Sawyer Seminar Grant, Co-Principal Investigator
- Business History Conference, Herman E. Krooss Dissertation Prize (Finalist)
- Social Science Research Council, Postdoctoral Fellowship for Transregional Research
- Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, Graduate Fellowship
