Peter Sahlins

Peter Sahlins is an American historian of France and Europe. He is a professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, specializing in early modern France. From 2006 to 2008 he was on leave at the Social Science Research Council as its Director of Academic Programs, where he directed the major fellowship programs and led a new environmental programming initiative.

Biography

Sahlins received his B.A. from Harvard in 1979 and his Ph.D. in history from Princeton in 1986. He taught at Columbia and Yale before joining the history department at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1989. He has served widely on university and professional committees, was executive director of the France-Berkeley Fund and founding director of the University of California's Paris Study Center and its international programs. He is a former director of the Interdisciplinary Studies Field major at Berkeley.
His father was Marshall Sahlins, a noted anthropologist.

Work

The interests that form the bulk of Peter Sahlins’ work include the social and legal history of early modern France and Europe. He has written on a range of topics, including the formation of national identities and frontiers ; Forest Governance, Peasant Culture and Protest in the Nineteenth Century ; State-Building and Immigration in Seventeenth-Century France ; The Premodern History of Nationality Law ; and most recently on animals, 1668: The Year of the Animal in France.