Peter Sahlins
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Peter Sahlins (born April 26, 1957) is an American historian of France and Europe. He is the Director of Academic Programs at the Social Science Research Council, where he directs the major fellowship programs and leads the new Social Sciences and Environment (SSE) program initiative. Until 2006, he was Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley.
[edit] Biography
Dr. Sahlins completed his undergraduate degree at Harvard University in 1980. In 1986 he obtained his doctorate in history from Princeton University. Afterwards he taught at Columbia University and Yale University before joining the history department at the University of California, Berkeley in 1989, where he served widely on university and professional committees, was executive director of the France-Berkeley Fund (1994-2002) and founding director of the University of California’s Paris Study Center and its constituent international programs. Joining the Social Science Research Council in 2006, he leads programming on the social science of climate change, and water governance, and has initiated collaborations on sustainable architecture and environment and health in China.
[edit] Work
The interests that form the bulk of Peter Sahlins’ work include the social and legal history of early modern France and Europe. Recently he has returned to earlier research interests in forest governance (The War of the Demoiselles in Nineteenth-Century France, Harvard University Press, 1994). His current work at the Social Science Research Council focuses on mapping shared interests between social scientists and natural scientists pertaining to environmental debates.
Sahlins has written on a range of topics, including the formation of national identities and frontiers (Boundaries: the Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees, UC Press, 1989); forest governance, peasant culture and protest in the nineteenth century (The War of the Demoiselles in Nineteenth-Century France, Harvard University Press, 1994); state-building and immigration in seventeenth-century France (with Jean-Francois Dubost, Et si on faisait payer les etrangers? Louis XIV, les immigres, et quelques autres, Flammarion, 1999); and most recently, on the premodern history of nationality law (Unnaturally French: Foreign Citizens in the Old Regime and After, Cornell University Press, 2004).
