Robert Tignor, general editor emeritus (Ph.D., Yale University) is professor emeritus and the Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Princeton University and the three-time chair of the history department. With Gyan Prakash, he introduced Princeton’s first course in world history thirty years ago. Professor Tignor has taught graduate and undergraduate courses in African history and world history and has written extensively on the history of twentieth-century Egypt, Nigeria, and Kenya. Besides his many research trips to Africa, Professor Tignor has taught at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria and the University of Nairobi in Kenya.
Jeremy Adelman, lead author of Volume 2 (D.Phil., Oxford University) has lived and worked in seven countries and on four continents. A graduate of the University of Toronto, he earned a master’s degree in economic history at the London School of Economics (1985) and a doctorate in modern history at Oxford University (1989). He is the author or editor of ten books, including Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (2006) and Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (2013), a chronicle of one of the twentieth century’s most original thinkers. He has been awarded fellowships by the British Council, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies (the Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship). He is currently the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History and the director of the Global History Lab at Princeton University. His next books will be Latin America: A Global History and Earth Hunger: Markets, Resources, and the Need for Strangers. He teaches a renowned on-line history of the modern world since 1300 to students around the world, including to students living in refugee camps in central and eastern Africa.
Stephen Aron (Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley) is Professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles and Executive Director, Institute for the Study of the American West, Autry National Center. A specialist in frontier and western American history, Aron is the author of How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay and American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border State. He has also published articles in a variety of books and journals, including the American Historical Review, the Pacific Historical Review, and the Western Historical Quarterly.
Stephen Kotkin (Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley) is Professor of History and teaches European and Asian history at Princeton University, where he also serves as director of Russian Studies. He is the author of Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970–2000 (2001) and Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (1995) and is a coeditor of Mongolia in the Twentieth Century: Landlocked Cosmopolitan (1999). His upcoming book is entitled Impaled Horses: Labyrinths of the Ob River Basin, which is a study of the Ob River valley over the last seven centuries. Future works include a biography of Joseph Stalin entitled Stalin’s World. Professor Kotkin has also served twice as a visiting professor in Japan.
Suzanne Marchand (Ph.D. University of Chicago) is associate professor of European and intellectual history at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge. Professor Marchand also spent a number of years teaching at Princeton University. She is the author of Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970 (1996) and is currently writing a book on German “orientalism.”
Michael Tsin (Ph.D. Princeton) is associate professor of history and international studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He previously taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Princeton University, Columbia University, and the University of Florida. Professor Tsin's primary interests include the histories of modern China and colonialism, and he is the author of Nation, Governance, and Modernity in China: Canton, 1900-1927 (paperback ed., 2003). His current research explores the politics of cultural translation with regard to the refashioning of social and institutional practices in China since the mid-nineteenth century.
