The historians invited to create the modules that make up Authoritarianism 101 are based at colleges and universities in the United States and around the world. Collectively their books, articles and on-going research projects explore critical dimensions of authoritarian history across Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and North America from the seventeenth to the early twenty-first centuries.
Gregory Ablavsky is the Marion Rice Kirkwood Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and professor of history by courtesy at Stanford University. He is the author of >i>Federal Ground: Governing Property and Violence in the First U.S. Territories
Robert D. Bland is an assistant professor of U.S. cultural history at the University Tennessee. His work focuses on the African American experience and the postbellum South in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century. He is the author of Requiem for Reconstruction: Black Counter Memory and the Legacy of the Low Country’s Lost Political Generation (University of North Carolina Press, 2026) and articles for the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and Journal of African American Studies.
Mark Philip Bradley is the editor of the American Historical Review and the Bernadotte E. Schmitt Distinguished Service Professor of History at the University of Chicago. His work has focused on postcolonial Southeast Asian history, the history of human rights, and the United States in the world. His current book project for Yale University Press, When the World Went South, is a cultural and visual history of the Global South in the late twentieth century.
Isabella Cosse is a scholar of gender, childhood, and family history in late twentieth-century Argentina and Latin America. She is a professor of history at Universidad Nacional de San Martín (Argentina) and a researcher at CONICET, Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council. Her books include Mafalda: A Social and Political History of Latin America’s Global Comic (Duke University Press, 2019) and The Cuban Revolution and the New Left: Transnational Histories of Gender, Sexuality, and Family (Florida University Press, 2026), which she coedited with Michelle Chase.
Samuel Fury Childs Daly is a professor of history at the University of Chicago. He is the author of A History of the Republic of Biafra: Law, Crime, and the Nigerian Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and Soldier’s Paradise: Militarism in Africa After Empire (Duke University Press, 2024), which has a chapter about Fela Kuti and his legal troubles.
Darren Dochuk is the Andrew V. Tackes Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. He researches the intersections of religion and politics in the United States and has published widely on this topic, including his edited collection Religion and Politics Beyond the Culture Wars: New Directions in a Divided America (University of Notre Dame Press, 2021), Anointed With Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America (Basic Books, 2019), and From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism(Norton, 2011).
Mona El-Ghobashy is a clinical associate professor of liberal studies at New York University. She is a scholar of the histories and politics of the Middle East and North Africa, and the author of the award-winning book Bread and Freedom: Egypt’s Revolutionary Situation (Stanford University Press, 2021).
Federico Finchelstein is an expert on fascism, populism, and dictatorship and is the University in Exile Research Professor and professor of history at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College in New York City. His books include The Wannabe Fascists (University of California Press, 2024), A Brief History of Fascist Lies (University of California Press, 2022), and From Fascism to Populism in History (University of California Press, 2019).
Rebecca Glade is a visiting research associate at Makerere Institute of Social Research in Uganda and associate editor of the Makerere Historical Journal, the journal of Makerere University’s Department of History, Archaeology, and Heritage Studies. Her book manuscript, Sudanese Political Movements and the Struggle for the State, 1964-1985, examines the intersections between political competition and state formation in the contested politics of early independence Sudan.
Brian J Griffith is an assistant professor of Modern European History at California State University, Fresno. He is the co-author of Where Monsters Are Born: Documenting a Fascist Revival in the Streets of Rome, 2018-2019 (November 2024) available at: https://www.wheremonstersareborn.com. He is currently completing his first monograph, Cultivating Fascism: Wine, Politics, and Identity in Mussolini’s Italy.
Pragya Kaul Guido received her PhD from the University of Michigan’s Department of History in 2026. Her research on Holocaust refugees in British India bridges the studies of refugees and the Holocaust with postcolonial histories of the British Empire. Guido’s s research has been supported by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes (2020–21). She was previously a Council Member (At Large) for the American Historical Association.
Hidetaka Hirota is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, where he serves as a faculty affiliate at the Asian American Research Center and the Center for Japanese Studies and directs the Canadian Studies Program. He is the author of Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy (Oxford University Press, 2017). His scholarship has been published in numerous journals, including the Journal of American History, American Quarterly, the Journal of American Ethnic History, and the Journal of the Civil War Era.
Patrick Iber is an associate professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America (Harvard University Press, 2015) and the forthcoming Poverty of the Imagination: The Cold War and the Social Science of Development in Latin America. He is coeditor of Dissent magazine.
Amy King is a senior lecturer at the University of Bristol. Her first monograph, Politics of Sacrifice: Remembering Italy’s Rogo di Primavalle, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2024. She is the co-author of Where Monsters Are Born: Documenting a Fascist Revival in the Streets of Rome, 2018-2019 (November 2024) available at: https://www.wheremonstersareborn.com.
Ashley Nichole Lewis is a member of the Quinault Indian Nation and a PhD candidate in the University of California-Davis’s Department of History. Her research analyzes Indigenous governance and resilience through examining Quinault relationships with Pacific Northwest salmon fisheries.
Namhee Lee is professor of modern Korean history and director of the Center for Korean Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Her publications include The Making of Minjung: Democracy and the Politics of Representation in South Korea (Cornell University Press, 2007), The South Korean Democratization Movement: A Sourcebook (coedited with Kim Won, Academy of Korean Studies, 2016), and Memory Construction and the Politics of Time in Neoliberal South Korea (Duke University Press, 2022).
Alex Lichtenstein is professor of history and American studies at Indiana University Bloomington, and a former editor of the AHR (2017-2021). His publications include Margaret Bourke-White and the Dawn of Apartheid (with Rick Halpern) and Marked, Unmarked, Remembered: A Geography of American Memory (with Andrew Lichtenstein).
Zachary Mazur is a senior historian at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw and a lecturer at the Polish Academy of Sciences Historical Institute. A graduate of Yale University, his work focuses on the interaction between economics, law, and nationalism in East Central Europe. He is the author of To Kill a Spy: Political Violence and Everyday Nationalism in Fin-de-Siecle Europe, forthcoming with CEU Press in early 2026.
Durba Mitra is the Stanley Kelley Jr., Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching in Princeton University’s Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies. She is a feminist historian and interdisciplinary scholar who specializes in histories of South Asia, South Asian diasporas, and global histories of women, gender, and sexuality. She is the author of two books, The Future That Was: A History of Third World Feminism Against Authoritarianism (Princeton University Press, 2026) and Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought (Princeton University Press, 2020).
Pedro Monaville is an associate professor of history at McGill University. His research focuses on colonial and postcolonial Congo, political subjectivities, memory work, and the connections between visual arts and history. He is the author of Students of the World: Global 1968 and Decolonization in the Congo (Duke University Press, 2022) and the coeditor (with Nancy Rose Hunt) of A Star of Street Comics: Papa Mfumu’Eto and the Popular in Congo’s Long 1990s (Leuven University Press, forthcoming 2026).
Benjamin Nathans is the Alan Charles Kors Endowed Term Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. His most recent book, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement, was awarded the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction and the Pushkin House (London) Russian Book Prize, among others. Nathans is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement.
Karl D. Qualls is a professor of history and W. Gibbs McKenney Chair in International Education at Dickinson College. He is the author of over two dozen chapters and articles and three books, From Ruins to Reconstruction: Urban Identity in Soviet Sevastopol After World War II (Cornell University Press, 2009) and its updated Ukrainian-language edition (Academic Studies Press, 2025), and Stalin’s Niños: Educating Spanish Civil War Refugee Children in the Soviet Union, 1937-1951 (University of Toronto Press, 2020).
Keith Rathbone is a senior lecturer at Macquarie University (Australia). He is the author of Sport and Physical Culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, Agency, and Everyday Life (Manchester University Press, 2022), which examines physical education and sports to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German occupation and the Vichy regime.
Burak Sayim is a Swiss National Science Foundation Ambizione Fellow at the University of Basel and the PI of the Anticolonial Internationalism in the Interwar Middle East project. His work has won several prizes, including the Walter Markov Prize, the Toynbee Prize Foundation First Book Workshop Competition, and an honorable mention from Amílcar Cabral Prize. His first book on the emergence of Middle Eastern communism in the 1920s is under contract with the University of California Press.
Scott Spector is the Rudolf Mrázek Collegiate Professor of History and German Studies at the University of Michigan; he received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 1994. He is a cultural and intellectual historian whose work has focused on the relationship of culture and ideology in modern Central Europe.
Lauren Stokes is a German historian at Northwestern University whose teaching includes comparative fascism. She is author of Fear of the Family: Guest Workers and Family Migration in the Federal Republic of Germany (Oxford University Press, 2022) and coeditor (with Michelle Lynn Kahn) of the forthcoming edited collection Racism and Antiracism in Divided Germany (Cornell University Press, 2026). She is currently researching right-wing and fascist environmentalism and mobility in the jet age.
Penny M. Von Eschen is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of History and American Studies at the University of Virginia. She has written widely on the intersection of politics and culture and the US in global and transnational dimensions. Her books include Paradoxes of Nostalgia: Cold War Triumphalism and Global Disorder Since 1989 (Duke University Press, 2022), Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Harvard University Press, 2004), and Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957 (Cornell University Press, 1997).
Jeffrey Wasserstrom is a Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California-Irvine, author of books such as Student Protests in Twentieth-Century China (Stanford University Press, 1991) and Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink (Columbia Global Reports, 2020); he is also a past Associate Editor of the AHR and the past editor of the Journal of Asian Studies (2008-2018). He has written about social movements, globalization, urban change, and human rights, usually focusing on China but often bringing in comparative and transnational issues, and he has published in a mix of specialist and general interest periodicals.
Adrian Chastain Weimer is a professor of history at Providence College. She is the author of A Constitutional Culture: New England and the Struggle Against Arbitrary Rule in the Restoration Empire (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023), which won the Winthrop Prize. Weimer’s research has been supported by long-term fellowships from the John Carter Brown Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Barbara Weinstein is Silver Professor of History at New York University and a past president of the American Historical Association. Her publications include The Color of Modernity: São Paulo and the Making of Race and Nation in Brazil (Duke University Press, 2015).
Siew Han Yeo is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Southeast Asian Studies at National University Singapore. She is a historian of colonial Burma. Her research focuses on the history and socio-legal construction of race, belonging, and identity, especially of the overseas Chinese in colonial Burma.
Louise Young is Marilyn B. Young Professor of Japanese History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the recipient of multiple awards, including Fulbright, Japan Foundation, and Social Science Research Council fellowships, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her research and teaching interests include social and intellectual history, Japanese imperialism, the Asia-Pacific War, and postwar Japan. She is the author of the Fairbank Prize-winning Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (University of California Press, 1998) and Beyond the Metropolis: Second Cities and Modern Life in Interwar Japan (University of California Press, 2013).