Hannah Muller

Hannah Weiss Muller is a historian of Britain and the British Empire with particular interests in the long eighteenth century and the intersections of law, monarchy, identity, and subjecthood. She teaches courses on early modern and modern Britain, the British Empire, Modern Europe, Global Wars and Revolutions, and Britain and South Asia.

Muller’s first book, entitled Subjects and Sovereign: Bonds of Belonging in the Eighteenth-Century British Empire (Oxford University Press. 2017), argues that subject status served as an organizing and contested principle of the eighteenth century and that the bond between monarch and subject was integral to the coherence of the British Empire. She examines particular debates and struggles that surfaced in Grenada, Quebec, Minorca, Gibraltar, and Calcutta to document the range of peoples who shaped the contours of subjecthood and the array of rights that became associated with British subject status. Her recent articles also examine the anxieties said to haunt isolated garrison societies and the range of interactions between colonial and local populations; transimperial cultures of petitioning; and entangled languages of rights, liberties, and privileges. She is currently working on a comparative history of the aliens acts passed in the 1790s.

Muller received her A.B. from Harvard University (2000) and her Ph.D. from Princeton University (2010). She was a recipient of the ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship in 2009-2010 and was a Golieb Fellow at the New York University School of Law in 2010-2011. Prior to coming to Brandeis in spring 2016, she taught as an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Denison University (2013-2015) and as a Lecturer in the Committee on Degrees in History and Literature at Harvard University (2011-2013).