Edith Sheffer joined the History Department faculty in 2010, having come to Stanford as an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in the Humanities in 2008.  Her first book, Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain (Oxford University Press, 2011), challenges the moral myth of the Berlin Wall, the Cold War’s central symbol. It reveals how the barrier between East and West did not simply arise overnight from communism in Berlin in 1961, but that a longer, lethal 1,393 kilometer fence had been developing haphazardly between the two Germanys since 1945.

Her current book, Soulless Children of the Reich: Hans Asperger and the Nazi Origins of Autism, investigates Hans Asperger’s creation of the autism diagnosis in Nazi Vienna, examining Nazi psychiatry's emphasis on social spirit and Asperger's involvement in the euthanasia program that murdered disabled children. A related project through Stanford's Spatial History Lab, "Forming Selves: The Creation of Child Psychiatry from Red Vienna to the Third Reich and Abroad," maps the transnational development of child psychiatry as a discipline, tracing linkages among its pioneers in Vienna in the 1930s through their emigration from the Third Reich and establishment of different practices in the 1940s in England and the United States. Sheffer's next book project, Hidden Front: Switzerland and World War Two, tells an in-depth history of a nation whose pivotal role remains unexposed--yet was decisive in the course of the Second World War.

Priya Satia specializes in modern British and British empire history.

Prof. Satia is a cultural historian of the material and intellectual infrastructure of the modern world in the age of empire. Her work examines the origins of state institutions, military technologies, ideas and practices of development, and the anti-colonial responses they inspired in order to understand how the imperial past has shaped the present and how the ethical dilemmas it posed were understood and managed.

Prof. Satia has explored these questions in studies of British policing of the Middle East in the era of World War One, the invention of radio during the Boer War, the British Indian development of Iraq, state secrecy in mass-democratic Britain, the gun-making exploits of a Quaker family during the industrial revolution, the Partition of British India, the imperial consequences of the historical discipline itself, and other projects. Her work on aerial policing has also informed her analysis of American drone use in the Middle East. An essay on her formation as a historian is available here in the H-Diplo series "Learning the Scholar's Craft."

Her first book Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East (OUP, 2008) won the 2009 AHA-Herbert Baxter Adams Book Prize, the 2009 AHA-Pacific Coast Branch Book Award, and the 2010 Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies Book Prize.

Her second book, Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution (Penguin Press/Duckworth, 2018) won the 2019 Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies Book Prize, the Wadsworth Prize in Business History, and the AHA's Jerry Bentley Prize in world history. It was also a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize in History and shortlisted for the Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies and the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize.

Prof. Satia's third book, Time's Monster: How History Makes History (Belknap HUP/Penguin Allen Lane, 2020) won the 2021 Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies Book Prize  and the 2021 Bronze Prize in History (World) from the Independent Publisher Book Awards. It was also listed in BBC History Magazine Books of the Year (2020) and the New Statesman's Best Books of the Year (2020).

Her work has also appeared in the American Historical Review, Past and Present, Technology and Culture, Humanity, Annales, History Workshop Journal, and other scholarly journals, as well as edited volumes across a range of fields (e.g. environmental history, Middle Eastern history, the Indian Ocean world, British politics, aerospatial theory, humanitarianism), and mainstream media (e.g. the Financial Times, the Nation, Times Literary Supplement, the Washington Post, Time Magazine, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Aeon, the Tribune, Slate.com, CNN.com, and more).

Prof. Satia is working on a new book project, The Lake of Liberation, on British colonialism in Punjab and its legacies.

Arie Dubnov is an Acting Assistant Professor at Stanford University’s Department of History. Dubnov holds a BA, an MA, and a Ph.D. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and is a past George L. Mosse Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His fields of expertise are modern Jewish and European intellectual history, with a subsidiary interest in nationalism studies. He is the author, most recently, of Isaiah Berlin: The Journey of a Jewish Liberal (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). In addition, Dubnov has published essays in journals such as Nations & Nationalism, Modern Intellectual History, History of European Ideas, The Journal of Israeli History and is the editor of the collection [in Hebrew] Zionism – A View from the Outside (The Bialik Institute, 2010), seeking to put Zionist history in a larger comparative trajectory. At Stanford Dubnov teaches courses in European intellectual history alongside Jewish and Israeli history.