Philip Stern

Philip J. Stern is Professor of History in the Department of History at Duke University. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2004. Stern joined the Duke faculty in 2008 as Assistant Professor of History, advancing to Associate Professor in 2013 and full Professor in 2024. During his tenure, he held several endowed positions, including Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor (2010-2011), Sally Dalton Robinson Associate Professor (2015-2018), and Gilhuly Family Associate Professor (2018-2020). He has served in key administrative roles, such as Director of Graduate Studies in History (2016-2019) and Honors Program Director.

Stern's scholarship centers on the legal, political, intellectual, and business histories of the British Empire, with particular emphasis on corporations and companies in colonial enterprise, overseas exploration and cartography, the historiography of British India, early modern economic thought, and digital methods for studying colonial sovereignty. His acclaimed books include Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023), The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (Oxford University Press, 2011)—which earned the 2011 Morris D. Forkosch Prize from the American Historical Association for the best book in British, imperial, or Commonwealth history since 1485—Mercantilism Reimagined: Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire (University of California Press, 2013), and The English East India Company at the Height of Mughal Expansion: A Soldier's Diary of the 1689 Siege of Bombay, with Related Documents (2015). Other notable works encompass articles such as "Alcohol and the Ambivalence of the Early English East India Company-State" (Historical Journal, 2022) and "Bombay: The Genealogy of a Global Imperial City" (Urban History, 2021).

Stern has garnered prestigious honors, including the New Directions Fellowship from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (2013), the J.B. Harley Fellowship in the History of Cartography (2012), election as a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (2011), and multiple fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He co-directs the BorderWork(s) Humanities Lab and has led interdisciplinary projects like the NEH-funded "Sandcastle Workflow" for visualizing pre-modern maps (2020-2023) and the Mellon Sawyer Seminar on "Corporate Rights and International Law" (2016-2019). His contributions have profoundly shaped scholarly understandings of corporate sovereignty and the early modern British Empire.

Professional Email: philip.stern@duke.edu