Sonya Schoenberger

Sonya Schoenberger is a PhD Candidate in History and a 2025-2026 Mellon Foundation Dissertation Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. Her work explores how imperial powers and indigenous communities in the Pacific engaged with law, science, and international institutions to assert control over vast oceanic domains in the second half the 20th century. Her dissertation, “Oceanic Sovereignties: Decolonization, Law of the Sea Negotiations, and the Rise of Large Ocean States, 1954-1996,” focuses on three material contexts: deep sea mineral deposits, migratory tuna stocks, and transboundary radioactive pollution.

Schoenberger’s dissertation project draws on archival research and oral history interviews in the United States and France and across Oceania. Her research in Viti Levu (Fiji), Pohnpei (the Federated States of Micronesia), Majuro (the Republic of Marshall Islands), Ma‘ohi Nui (French Polynesia), Kanaky New Caledonia, Guåhan (Guam), Saipan (the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands), Tutuila (American Samoa), and Oahu (Hawaii) has been generously supported by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Award, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations’ Myrna F. Bernath Fellowship, and grants from the King Center on Global Development and the Stanford Program in History and Philosophy of Science. 

She has also conducted research on the humanitarian consequences of the French nuclear testing program in Polynesia and the politics of victim redress in the 21st century. Her work on these topics has been published in Science & Global Security and in an edited volume on environmental violence published by Cambridge University Press. Her writing on histories of deep sea mining in Oceania has been published in the Comparative Law Journal of the Pacific and in TIME. She has presented her research widely, in English and in French, at places including the University of the South Pacific in Suva, the Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD) in Nouméa, the Institut français pour l’exploitation de la mer (Ifremer) in Brest, and academic conferences in the fields of Pacific history, legal history, environmental history, and the history of science. In 2025, she was a Summer Academy Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory in Frankfurt, Germany. 

She holds a JD from Yale Law School and a BA in History from Washington University in St. Louis.