James P. Daughton is an historian of modern Europe and European imperialism with a particular interest in political, cultural, and social history, as well as the history of humanitarianism.

His first book, An Empire Divided: Religion, Republicanism, and the Making of French Colonialism, 1880-1914 (Oxford University Press, 2006) tells the story of how troubled relations between Catholic missionaries and a host of republican critics shaped colonial policies, Catholic perspectives, and domestic French politics in the decades before the First World War.  Based on archival research from four continents, the book challenges the long-held view that French colonizing and “civilizing” goals were the product of a distinctly secular republican ideology built on Enlightenment ideals.  By exploring the experiences of religious workers, one of the largest groups of French men and women working abroad, the book argues that many “civilizing” policies were wrought in the fires of discord between missionaries and anti-clerical republicans – discord that indigenous communities exploited in responding to colonial rule.

Professor Daughton's current project, entitled Humanity So Far Away: Violence, Suffering, and Humanitarianism in the Modern French Empire, places the successes and failures of colonial “civilizing” projects within the broader context of the development of European sensibilities regarding violence, global suffering, and human rights.  Based on research in archives on five continents, Humanity So Far Away explores the central role human suffering played as an experience, a moral concept, and a political force in the rise and fall of French imperialism from the late 1800s to the 1960s.  The book also considers how colonial practices increasingly intersected with efforts to establish norms of humane behavior – efforts most often led by non-state and international bodies, especially the League of Nations and the International Labor Organization.  Drawing on the methods of political, cultural, and intellectual history, my research ultimately aims to explore concretely the extent to which notions about empathy and humanitarianism spread (or failed to spread) from Europe to the outermost reaches of the globe in the twentieth century.

Jonathan Rodden is professor of political science at Stanford, director of the Spatial Social Science Lab, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.  He has written several articles and a pair of books on federalism and fiscal decentralization, and continues to work on issues related to state and local government finance around the world.  His most recent work focuses on economic and political geography in North America, Europe, and beyond.  He published a book on the topic in 2019, entitled Why Cities Lose: The Deep Roots of the Urban-Rural Political Divide. 

Rodden has several ongoing research projects with collaborators in Europe, including a new project on comparative federalism at the University of Salzburg.  He spent the winter of 2013 as a visiting scholar at the Juan March Institute in Madrid while also teaching in Stanford’s Madrid Bing Overseas Program.

Rodden received his PhD from Yale University and his BA from the University of Michigan, and was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Leipzig, Germany. Before joining the Stanford faculty, he was the Ford Associate Professor of Political Science at MIT. 

Rodden's research was featured in The Europe Center February 2018 Newsletter.

Laura Stokes completed their Ph.D. at the University of Virginia in 2006. Their first book, Demons of Urban Reform, examines the origins of witchcraft prosecution in fifteenth-century Europe against the backdrop of a general rise in the prosecution of crime and other measures of social control. In the process they have investigated the relationship between witchcraft and sodomy persecutions as well as the interplay between the unregulated development of judicial torture and innovations within witchcraft prosecution.

Their current research is an examination of quotidian economic culture during the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries. This project, under the working title A Social History of Greed in the Age of the Reformation, is based largely on the examination of court depositions from the city of Basel. Its first fruit will be a microhistory on The Murder of Uly Mörnach, currently in process. Prof. Stokes also directs a digital humanities project "Panic and Pandemic" which maps outbreaks of plague and epidemic in early modern Europe against social and literary responses to disease.