Professor Emeritus
Peter Sahlins was a member of the History Department at UC Berkeley from 1989 to 2019, rising to the ranks of Associate Professor (1994) to Professor (1997). He regularly taught the lower level Europe since the Renaissance, as well as advanced and graduate courses on a wide range of topics, from early modern state-building to environmental and animal histories. He is the author of six books, most recently Neanderthals Among Us: The Making of a Prehistoric Human (2026). His research has spanned France and Spain from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, focusing on questions of boundaries and identities; immigration, naturalization, and citizenship; the history of forests and forestry in France; human-animal relations; and the history of prehistory. Among his administrative accomplishments, he was the founding director of the France-Berkeley Fund (1992-2002); the founding director of UC Paris (2002-5), and director of the Interdisciplinary Studies Field in the Undergraduate Division (2013-9). On leave in 2006-8, he was Director of Academic Programs at the Social Science Research Council in New York. Since 2007, he has served on the Board of Directors of the international NGO, Bibliothèques sans frontiéres/Libraries Without Borders. He lives in France, dividing his time between Paris and Arcy-sur-Cure.
Education
BA, Harvard College (1979)
PhD, Princeton University (1986)
Research Interests
Early Modern and Early Nineteenth-Century France, Social and Legal Histories of Nationality Law and Citizenship; Animal-Human Relations, Animal Studies, Environmental History, Science Studies, Prehistory, Neanderthals.
Books
Neanderthals Among Us: The Making of a Prehistoric Human (London: Oneworld; and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2026).
1668: The Year of the Animal in France (New York: Zone Books, 2017).
Unnaturally French: Foreign Citizens in the Old Regime and After (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).
Et si on faisait payer les étrangers? Louis XIV, les immigrés, et quelques autres (Paris: Editions Flammarion, 1999) (co-authored with Jean-François Dubost).
Forest Rites: The War of the Demoiselles in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994).
Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989; paperback edition, 1991; Catalan translation, 1993; French translation, 1996).
Edited Journal Issues
Animals in French History, ed. with Christopher Pearson, special issue of French History, vol. 8, no. 2 (June 2014).
Mobility in French History, ed. with Carla Hesse, special issue of French Historical Studies, vol. 29, no. 3 (2006)
Selected Recent Articles & Book Chapters
“Reimagining the Civic Role of Libraries,” in The Library Quarterly (forthcoming 2026; co-
authored with Aaron Greenberg).
“1668,” Dictionary Entry, Dictionnaire historique et critique des animaux, ed. P. Serna
(Paris, 2024).
“La Menagerie et le Labyrinthe,” in A. Maral and N. Milanovic, eds., Les Animaux du Roi.
Catalogue of the Exhibit at Versailles (Paris, 2021).
“Picasso on the Margins,” in A. Cohen Solel, ed., Picasso, L’Etranger: Catalogue de
l’Exposition (Paris, 2021).
"The Beast Within: Animals and the First Xenotransfusion Experiments in France, 1667- 68,"Representations 129 (Winter 2015).
"A Story of Three Chameleons: The Animal between Literature and Science in the Age of Louis XIV," in Louisa MacKenzie, and Stephanie Posthumus, eds., French Thinking About Animals (Michigan State University Press, 2014): 15-30.
"Where the Sun Don't Shine: the Royal Labyrinth at Versailles, 1668-1674," in Pia Cuneo, ed., Animals and Early Modern Identity (Ashgate: Surrey, England and Burlington, VT, 2014): 67-88.
"The Royal Menageries of Louis XIV and the Civilizing Process Revisited," French Historical Studies 35 (2) (2012), 226-46.
"Boundaries and Identities in Catalonia," in Oscar Jané, ed., Del tractat dels Pireineus (1659) a l'Europa del segle XXI: Un model en construccio (in Catalan; Barcelona, 2010): 25-30.
"Citizenship and the Droit d'Aubaine in France: A Response to Simona Cerutti," in Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 63, no. 2 (March-April 2008): 385-98.
"The Eighteenth-Century Revolution in Citizenship" in Migration Controls in the North Atlantic World: the Evolution of State Practices in Europe and the United States from the French Revolution to the Interwar Period, ed. A. Fahrmeir, O. Faron, and P. Weil (New York and Oxford: Berghan Books, 2002): 11-24.
"Nationalité avant la lettre: les pratiques de la naturalization sous l'Ancien Régime" Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales, vol. 55, no. 5 (2000) : 1081-1108 [in French].
