IEA
Home2011/2012 Fellows
Fellowship from August 2010 to July 2011
Research project:
The Shapes of Power: Frontiers, Borderlands, Middle Grounds, and Empires in North America, 1600-1900
The Shapes of Power provides a reinterpretation of the history of power-its distribution among societies, its spatial configurations, its various expressions, its contested meanings-in North America from the establishment of first permanent European colonies to the consolidation of Anglo-American hegemony in the late nineteenth century. This is an interdisciplinary project that engages and moves forward key problems that in recent years have entered the core of historical and humanistic studies. These include rethinking the trajectories and consequences of European colonialism, the contingency of historical change, the intersections between large structural and local face-to-face power arrangements, identity formation in fluid cross-cultural contexts, and construction of new narrative forms that blend cultural and social modes of explanation. By emphasizing indigenous agency and meaning-making, the project challenges the traditional Eurocentric interpretations of cross-cultural relations, colonial expansion, and empire building in North America and elsewhere.
Biographical elements:
Pekka Hämäläinen is associate professor of borderlands, Native American, and environmental history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his PhD from the University of Helsinki in
2001 and has been a fellow at the William P. Clements Center in Southwest Studies at the Southern Methodist University, the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. His writings have appeared in the American Historical Review, Journal of American History, William and Mary Quarterly, and Western Historical Quarterly, and he is the author of The Comanche Empire (Yale, 2008), which received numerous awards and recognitions, including the Bancroft Prize in American history, the Merle Curti Prize in US social, cultural and intellectual history, and the Recognition of Excellence in the Cundill International Prize in History at McGill University.
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