Sarah Nelson is a historian of US empire, global governance, and decolonization, and is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for History at Leiden University. There, she serves as a postdoctoral fellow on the ERC Project “Challenging the Liberal World Order from Within: the Invisible History of the United Nations and the Global South” (INVISIHIST).

More information about Sarah Nelson

Overview

Sarah Nelson is a historian of US empire, global governance, and decolonization, and is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for History at Leiden University. There, she serves as a postdoctoral fellow on the ERC Project “Challenging the Liberal World Order from Within: the Invisible History of the United Nations and the Global South” (INVISIHIST).  

Her current book project, Networking Empire, examines how international telecommunications and the glow flow of news became key sites of geopolitical contestation from the interwar period to the end of the Cold War. It argues that debates over the meaning and scope of “information freedom” transformed what it meant to govern globally: spurring new standards of sovereignty and norms of international governance over the long arc of decolonization.

Sarah received her PhD in history, and a Joint-PhD in comparative media, from Vanderbilt University in 2021. Her work has appeared in Radical History Review, Technology and Culture, and The Conversation, and has been supported by the National Endowment for Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and the Jefferson Scholars Foundation, among others.

Her work in the Digital Humanities has produced interactive digital timelines, ArcGIS ESRI Story Maps, and a number of podcasts. She is currently at work on a project called Mapping Communications Inequality, which uses statistical data from the International Telecommunication Union to help visualize the growth of the growth telecommunications network over the first century of its expansion, from the 1860s to 1970s. She is also the Executive Producer of the Global Orders Podcast, a production of the ERC-funded INVISIHIST project.

Fields of interest

Transnational history of U.S. empire, 1865-present

History of international organizations, global governance, and decolonization

Political economic history of international telecommunications and mass media

U.S. intellectual, political, and cultural history, 1865-present

Grants and awards

Saki Ruth Dockrill Prize for Best Paper, UCSB/LSE/GWU New Scholars in Cold War History (2022)

Botsiber Foundation (2022)

Pamela Laird Award, Mercurian Society (2022)

National Endowment for Humanities (2021)

Ambrose Monell Fellowship for Technology and Democracy, Jefferson Scholars Foundation (2020)

Ingram Scholarship for Academic Excellence, Vanderbilt University (2017-2021)

Mellon Foundation Graduate Fellowship for the Digital Humanities (2018)

Publications