The Center for Collaborative History

John Haldon is professor of Byzantine History and Hellenic Studies.  His research centers on the socio-economic, institutional, political and cultural history of the early and middle Byzantine empire from the seventh to the eleventh centuries. He also works on political systems and structures across the European and Islamic worlds from late ancient to early modern times and has explored how resources were produced, distributed and consumed, especially in warfare, during the late ancient and medieval periods. Professor Haldon is the director of the Euchaita/Avkat Project - an archaeological and historical survey in north central Turkey that employs cutting edge survey, mapping and digital modeling techniques to enrich our understanding of the society, economy, land use, demography, paleo-environmental history and resources of the late Roman, Byzantine and Seljuk/Ottoman periods. He is also co-director of the international Medieval Logistics Project - an international project deploying Geographical Information Systems and sophisticated modeling software to analyze the logistics of East Roman, early medieval Western European and Early Islamic warfare and structures of resource allocation. (http://www.medievallogistics.bham.ac.uk/)

Read more at:  http://www.princeton.edu/avkat/avkat_introduction/

Emmanuel Kreike focuses on the intersection of war/violence/population movements, environment, and society. He is particularly interested in how violence (including, for example, colonial conquest, the apartheid wars, slave raiding) and ensuing forced migration led to the destruction of human landscapes and how people rebuild lives and livelihoods in often alien environments. He has taught courses in African history and environmental history at Princeton University as well as courses in forestry and environmental sciences in Namibia and South Africa. Emmanuel Kreike is currently researching the impact of the apartheid wars on southern Africa's environment and rural society from a transnational and comparative perspective. The project is based on field and archival research in Mozambique and South Africa (in 1996 and 1999-2000) and Namibia (1991-1993, 2000).

Read and hear more at: http://bit.ly/46bTP0  

Robert Karl Robert Karl works on modern Latin American history, with a focus on relations between states and citizens in the twentieth century. His research concentrates on the political history of mid-twentieth century Colombia, particularly practices of peace and violence. His current book manuscript, “Colombia’s Forgotten Peace: Improvising Reform in the Era of the Cold War,” looks at the politics of security and property in central Colombia between 1957 and 1966, a “revolutionary” conjuncture for Colombia and the rest of Latin America. The manuscript additionally considers the meanings of the “cold war” at the start of the 1960s, including the origins of the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia).

Karl's other research and teaching interests include U.S.-Latin American relations, international history, and the application of GIS and other approaches in the digital humanities. He is currently assembling several databases on violence, land disputes, and frontier land titling in twentieth-century Colombia.

Yair Mintzker is an assistant professor of history, specializing in German-speaking Central Europe from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. His broad interests include urban history as well as intellectual, cultural, and political history of Early Modern and Modern Europe. Prof. Mintzker’s dissertation, The Defortification of the German City, 1689-1866  tells the story of the metamorphosis of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German cities from walled to defortified places. In the coming years, Prof. Mintzker plans to turn his dissertation into a book while also beginning to work on a book on one of the most notorious events in eighteenth-century Germany: the trial and execution of Joseph Süss Oppenheimer (“Jud Süss”), in 1730s Stuttgart.