People

People Details

  • Julia Stephens
  • Julia Stephens
  • Associate Professor of History; and Vice Chair for Undergraduate Education
  • 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
  • Office: 114 Van Dyck Hall

 

{Photo credit: Roy Groething}

RESEARCH INTERESTS

My research focuses on colonial and post-colonial South Asia and its global diasporas. My most recent book, Worldly Afterlives: Tracing Diasporic Trails Between India and Empire (Princeton University Press, December 2025), follows families as they travelled across the Indian Ocean and British Empire to explore the haunted afterlives of colonial migrations. In the rustle of archival documents and the dust of family photo albums, the book encounters histories of empire that live on through the experiences of descendants and the ghosts of their ancestors. Spanning Asia, Africa, the Gulf, Europe, and the Americas, Worldly Afterlives challenges ethno-nationalist and patriarchal approaches to studying Asian diasporas to center histories of women, subaltern migrants, and people of mixed heritage. Instead of one-way journeys from Asia to the Global North, these families migrated repeatedly, often between destinations in Asia and Africa. My historical methods draw inspiration from visual artists, albums, cemeteries, and curio cabinets. Chapters on online ancestry and social media argue for new approaches to studying public history in the Global South that trace diasporic pasts through fluid digital mediascapes.

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.

My teaching spans modern South Asia, its global diasporas, law, women and gender history, migration, Islam, family, digital, and public history. One of my favorite pastimes is talking about archives with students. Before coming to Rutgers, I taught at Yale, Cambridge, and Harvard.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

  • Worldly Afterlives: Tracing Family Trails Between India and Empire, Princeton University Press, 2025
  • Governing Islam: Law, Empire, and Secularism in South Asia, Cambridge University, Press, 2018. South Asia Edition, 2019.
  • “Material Modernities: Tracing Janbai’s Gendered Mobilities Across the Indian Ocean.” Modern Asian Studies 58, no. 2 (2024): 386-420.
    - Honorable Mention, Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, Best Article Prize in Women/Gender History
  •  “Stuck at Home: Rethinking Mobility and Immobility in Histories of Asian Migration.” In AHR History Lab, “On Transnational and International History,” American Historical Review 128, no.1 (2023): 311-317.
  • “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

  • Senior Fellow, Humanities Research Fellowship, New-York University, Abu Dhabi (2022-2023)
  • 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)