Social Science Research Council

Director of Academic Programs, Program Director: International Dissertation Research Fellowship (IDRF); Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship (DPDF); Social Sciences and the Environment (SSE)

sahlins@ssrc.org
Office Phone: Ext. 476

Peter Sahlins joins the SSRC from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was professor of history specializing in early modern France. After receiving his doctorate at Princeton, he taught at Columbia and Yale before joining the history department at Berkeley in 1989. He 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); 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). He has served widely on university and professional committees, and most recently 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 (2002-2005).