Julia Stephens

Julia Stephens

Julia Stephens is a historian of modern South Asia and will join the History Department at Yale University as an Assistant Professor in 2014-2015.  Her current research focuses on the evolving relationship between colonial law and Islam from the late eighteenth to the mid twentieth century.  At Yale she will teach classes on South Asian history, Islam, colonial law, and the South Asian diaspora.

Stephens holds as an AB (2005) in Social Studies from Harvard College, an MPhil in Oriental Studies (2007) from Trinity College, Cambridge, and is completing her PhD in History at Harvard University.  Before starting her PhD she lived in Lucknow, India for a year, where she studied Urdu and Persian at the American Institute for Indian Studies.  Her research has been funded by the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and the Harvard South Asia Initiative, among others. 

Stephens will be a post-doctoral fellow at the Centre for History and Economics at Cambridge University in 2013-2014.   Her article “The Phantom Wahhabi: Liberalism and the Muslim Fanatic in Mid-Victorian India” is forthcoming in Modern Asian Studies.