Peter Sahlins

Professor Sahlins completed his undergraduate degree at Harvard University in 1979. In 1986 he obtained his doctorate in history from Princeton University. Afterwards he taught at Columbia University and Yale University before joining the history department at the University of California, Berkeley in 1989, where he has served widely on university and professional committees, was executive director of the France-Berkeley Fund (1994-2002) and founding director of the University of California's Paris Study Center and its constituent international programs. Since 2013, he has been Director of the Interdisciplinary Studies Field major at Berkeley.

His father is the noted anthropologist, Marshall Sahlins.

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 (Boundaries: the Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees, UC Press, 1989); forest governance, peasant culture and protest in the nineteenth century (The War of the Demoiselles in Nineteenth-Century France, Harvard University Press, 1994); state-building and immigration in seventeenth-century France (with Jean-Francois Dubost, Et si on faisait payer les etrangers? Louis XIV, les immigres, et quelques autres, Flammarion, 1999); the premodern history of nationality law (Unnaturally French: Foreign Citizens in the Old Regime and After, Cornell University Press, 2004); and most recently on animals, 1668: The Year of the Animal in France (New York: Zone Books, 2017).

• Peter Sahlins Biography at the University of California Berkeley
• University of California’s Paris Study Center