Eurasian Empires Workshop
Eurasian Empires explores the connected and comparative history of empires from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. Our intellectual remit encompasses the global and regional histories of imperial formations, including the Russian, Ottoman, Safavid, Qajar, Uzbek, Mughal, Qing, Dutch, Portuguese, British, and French empires, as well as the regions and dynasties within these imperial geographies. We focus not only on how imperial centers governed diverse peoples, but also on how infrastructures mediated relationships among humans, non-humans, and empires between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. Building on discussions in the 2024–25 workshop around spatial formation, labor extraction, and energy networks, we are interested this year in scholarship that explores the local and trans-imperial infrastructures that enabled these processes: infrastructures that connected different empires while producing diverse trajectories across time and space. For 2026–27, we therefore propose the theme “Inter-Imperial Infrastructures: Value, Temporality, and Circulation.”
Infrastructures are material arrangements that enable the organization and movement of people, goods, and resources, creating the conditions under which different technologies operate as systems. Empires themselves can be understood as large-scale infrastructural formations sustained through the coordinated operation of multiple technologies. This year, we invite scholars whose work on infrastructure pushes the boundaries between human and non-human worlds, as well as between micro- and macro-scale histories. We organize the theme Inter-Imperial Infrastructures around three subthemes across the three quarters: a) Cosmologies of Infrastructure; b) Infrastructures of Value; and c) Imperial Temporalities.
2026-2027 Faculty Organizer:
Nora Barakat | nbarakat [at] stanford.edu (nbarakat[at]stanford[dot]edu)
Partha Pratim Shil | pshil [at] stanford.edu (pshil[at]stanford[dot]edu)
2026-2027 Graduate Student Organizers:
Anwar Haneef | ahaneef [at] stanford.edu (ahaneef[at]stanford[dot]edu)
Karventha Kuppusamy | kventhan [at] stanford.edu (kventhan[at]stanford[dot]edu)
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