Assistant Professor of History

Office Hours: Tuesday 12:30-2pm in-person or by appointment via Zoom

Bishop Hall 328A
662-915-7016  |  pdthilly@olemiss.edu

Education
Ph.D. Northwestern University

Teaching and Research Interests
Legal Culture and Capitalism, Modern Asia

Peter Thilly is a historian of Modern China, with research and teaching interests Qing and Republican Chinese history, Japanese and British imperialism, migration, citizenship, global capitalism, and comparative legal cultures.

His first book, entitled The Opium Business: A History of Crime and Capitalism in Maritime China (Stanford University Press, 2022), is a social history of business-state relations during the rise of global capitalism. It traces the rise and transformation of the opium trade in coastal southern Fujian province, first from contraband to tax staple, and then mutating in the early twentieth century into something that was simultaneously a prohibited commodity, political symbol, and the financial engine of a wide range of regimes: warlords, Guomindang state builders, colonial states in maritime Southeast Asia, and in the very end, the Japanese occupation government. He is now working on a book about the 1853 Small Sword Rebellion and its relationship to the history of diaspora, migration, and citizenship.

Professor Thilly’s June 2017 article in Late Imperial China, entitled “Opium and the Origins of Treason in Modern China: The View from Fujian,” explains how opium traders came to personify treason during the most critical moment in the crystallization of modern Chinese nationalism – the Opium War of 1839-41. His second article, “The Fujisturu Mystery: Translocal Xiamen, Japanese Expansionism, and the Asian Cocaine Trade, 1900-1937,” highlights the role of opportunism and entrepreneurialism within the wider history of state efforts to control trade in maritime Asia. Thilly is also a contributor to the Bodies and Structures 2.0 digital history project, and was co-editor of a special issue of Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review, entitled “Taiwan: Global Island.”

Peter Thilly CV

Visiting Assistant Professor

Office Hours: Wednesdays and Fridays, 10:00am-11:30am and by Appointment

Old Athletics 101A
(662) 915-5411 | rfletch@olemiss.edu

Education
Ph.D., University of Mississippi

Teaching and Research Interests
South and West, Religion and Labor

Ryan L. Fletcher is a historian of American regionalism. He specializes in the religious politics generated by the westward expansions of slavery and capitalism. Ryan teaches courses on colonial America, the early republic, the South, and the West.

Associate Professor of History

Bishop Hall 322

(662) 915-3969 |  rkmarchi@olemiss.edu

Education
Ph.D, Northwestern University

Teaching and Research Interests

Urban History and Capitalism, 20th-century America

Rebecca Marchiel is an historian of urban history, political history, and the history of American capitalism. She is currently working on her first book project, “After Redlining: The Urban Reinvestment Movement in the Era of Financial Deregulation.” The book examines how the U.S. financial system shaped and was shaped by the political organizing of ordinary people during the last third of the twentieth century. It charts the story of a multiracial coalition of low- and moderate-income urbanites who sought community control over investment capital. Drawing on the unprocessed archive of the movement’s lead organization, National People’s Action, the project explores how activists fought to preserve the benefits of regulated banking at a time when the New Deal financial regime began to crumble.

Marchiel received her B.A. from the University of Michigan, and her Ph.D. from Northwestern University. She taught U.S. history at Franklin and Marshall College for one year before joining the UM faculty in 2015. She was awarded a fellowship from Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center, 2015-2106.

Rebecca Marchiel CV