Laura Jane Mitchell

I’m an historian by training, a story-teller by inclination, a teacher by vocation, and (sometimes) an administrator by necessity.

I seek to make sense of early modern societies using the tools of our digital age, and to make history accessible to diverse audiences, from K-12 students to museum-goers and devotees of the History Channel. My published work explores the colonial history of South Africa and the contours of world history as both a teaching subject and research enterprise.

My current research documents processes of collecting objects—including natural history specimens, hunting trophies, ethnographic materials, and art—by Westerners in southern Africa. My next book, *Beastly Display,* will document the range of transactions in Africa that enabled visitors to acquire local goods, then follow the transshipment and translation of those objects into personal property and museum displays in western Europe and North America. The research for *Beastly Display* has taken me to the public galleries and storage vaults of art, science, and folklore museums in Chicago, New York, London, Oxford, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Leiden, The Hague, Johannesburg, and Cape Town, mirroring the trajectory the objects I study.

I am an associate professor of African and world history at the University of California, Irvine, where I have served as the director of both undergraduate and graduate studies, the history department’s undergraduate internship program, the Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies, and as vice-chair of the history department. I spent six years as co-chair of the committee that develops the Advanced Placement exam in World History, three years on the Executive Council of the World History Association, and am a past-president of the Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction.

I believe that history is a collaborative act. Especially world history. I joined forces with Ross Dunn to write a textbook: *Panorama: A World History.* We also produced, with Kerry Ward, a reader on the state of the field, *The New World History: A Field Guide for Teachers and Researchers.* With Alan Karras I co-edited a celebration of Jerry Bentley’s influence on globalist scholarship, *Encounters Old and New in World History.* I also worked with Ken Pomeranz and Jim Given to edit a primary source reader for introductory world history classes.

My research has been supported by grants from Fulbright, the American Council for Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and the University of California.

I’m on Twitter as @sugar_bird