Guest Speakers

Alan Kahan is professor of British Civilization at the Université de Paris-Saclay. He received his PhD at the University of Chicago. He is the author of multiple books, including Aristocratic Liberalism: The Social and Political Thought of Jacob Burckhardt, John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville; Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century Europe: the Political Culture of Limited Suffrage; Mind vs. Money: The War Between Intellectuals and Capitalism; and Tocqueville, Democracy, and Religion. He is currently working on Liberalism – An Incomplete History, which will be published by Princeton University Press. Kahan has been living in France since 2007.

Professor Ying ZHANG is a historian at Leiden University. She specializes in late medieval and early modern China (14-18th c.) and is mostly interested in exploring the history of Chinese political institutions, literati culture, and gender and family. Her current research is focused on examining the intersection of bureaucracy, law, and society in the Ming dynasty.

Walter Hawthorne is a professor of African and Digital History, director of Enslaved.org, and an editor of the Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation. His research focuses on the history of Atlantic slavery and the Atlantic trade in enslaved people of African descent. His most recent book, From Africa to Brazil: Culture, Identity, and an Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600-1830, examines the slave trade from Africa to Amazonia, Brazil. His digital project, Enslaved.org, accounts for the lives of named enslaved individuals of African descent in the Atlantic world, revealing their stories to scholars, educators, and genealogists.