Worlds Together, Worlds Apart

Robert Tignor, general editor emeritus (Ph.D., Yale University) is professor emeritus and the Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Princeton University and the three-time chair of the history department. With Gyan Prakash, he introduced Princeton’s first course in world history thirty years ago. Professor Tignor has taught graduate and undergraduate courses in African history and world history and has written extensively on the history of twentieth-century Egypt, Nigeria, and Kenya. Besides his many research trips to Africa, Professor Tignor has taught at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria and the University of Nairobi in Kenya. Jeremy Adelman, lead author of Volume 2 (D.Phil., Oxford University) has lived and worked in seven countries and on four continents. A graduate of the University of Toronto, he earned a master’s degree in economic history at the London School of Economics (1985) and a doctorate in modern history at Oxford University (1989). He is the author or editor of ten books, including Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (2006) and Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (2013), a chronicle of one of the twentieth century’s most original thinkers. He has been awarded fellowships by the British Council, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies (the Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship). He is currently the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History and the director of the Global History Lab at Princeton University. His next books will be Latin America: A Global History and Earth Hunger: Markets, Resources, and the Need for Strangers. He teaches a renowned on-line history of the modern world since 1300 to students around the world, including to students living in refugee camps in central and eastern Africa. Peter Brown (Ph.D. Oxford University) is the Rollins Professor of History at Princeton University. He previously taught at London University and the University of California, Berkeley. He has written on the rise of Christianity and the end of the Roman empire. His works include: Augustine of Hippo (1967); The World of Late Antiquity (1972); The Cult of the Saints (1981); Body and Society (1988), The Rise of Western Christendom (1995 and 2002); Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire (2002). He is presently working on issues of wealth and poverty in the late Roman and early medieval Christian world. Benjamin Elman (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania) is a Professor of East Asian Studies and History at Princeton University. He is currently serving as the Director of the Princeton Program in East Asian Studies. He taught at the University of California, Los Angeles for over 15 years. His teaching and research fields include Chinese intellectual and cultural history, 1000-1900; the history of science in China, 1600-1930; the history of education in late imperial China; and Sino-Japanese cultural history, 1600-1850. He is the author of five books: From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China (1984, 1990, 2001); Classicism, Politics, and Kinship: The Ch'ang-chou School of New Text Confucianism in Late Imperial China (1990); A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China (2000); On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550-1900 (2005); and A Cultural History of Modern Science in China (2006). He is also the creator of "Classical Historiography for Chinese History" at http://www.princeton.edu/~classbib/, a Web-based bibliography and teaching site published since 1996 and continually revised. Xinru Liu (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania) is Assistant Professor of early Indian history and world history at the College of New Jersey. She is associated with the Institute of World History, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. She is the author of Ancient India and Ancient China: Trade and Religious Exchanges, AD 1-600 (1988); Silk and Religion: an Exploration of Material Life and the Thought of People, AD 600-1200 (1996); Connections across Eurasia: Transportation, Communication, and Cultural Exchange on the Silk Roads, co-authored with Lynda Norene Shaffer (2007); A Social History of Ancient India (1990 in Chinese). Professor Xinru Liu dedicates her life to promote South Asian studies and world history studies in both the United States and the People's Republic of China. Holly Pittman (Ph.D. Columbia University) is Professor of Art History at the University of Pennsylvania where she teaches art and archaeology of Mesopotamia and the Iranian Plateau. She also serves as Curator in the Near East Section of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Previously she served as a curator in the Ancient Near Eastern Art Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has written extensively on the art and culture of the Bronze Age in the Middle East and has participated in excavations in Cyprus, Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran where she currently works. Her research investigates works of art as media through which patterns of thought, cultural development, as well as historical interactions of ancient cultures of the Near East are reconstructed. Brent Shaw (Ph.D. Cambridge University) is the Andrew Fleming West Professor of Classics at Princeton University where he is Director of the Program in the Ancient World. He was previously at the University of Pennsylvania, where he chaired the Graduate Group in Ancient History. His principal areas of specialization as a Roman historian are in the subjects of Roman family history and demography, sectarian violence and conflict in Late Antiquity, and in the regional history of Africa as part of the Roman empire. He has published Spartacus and the Slaves Wars (2001), edited the papers of Sir Moses Finley, Economy and Society in Ancient Greece (1981), and published in a variety of books and journals, including The Journal of Roman Studies, The American Historical Review, The Journal of Early Christian Studies, and Past & Present.