Visiting Assistant Professors
Thanks to generous funding by the Tinberg family, EPC has hired two Visiting Assistant Professors for 2026-2027, both of whom will begin teaching at Northwestern in winter quarter 2026.
Research Interests: Political Theory, Environmental Politics, History and Ethics of Technology, History of Economic Thought, Comparative Political Theory
Hannah Glasson is a political theorist who specializes in environmental politics and the politics of technology. She received her PhD in Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought from Virginia Tech in 2024. During the 2024-25 academic year, she was a Visiting Scholar in the Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University. Her book project is an intellectual history of systems theory and cybernetics, which examines how developments at the intersection of biology, ecology, and the information revolution elevated the concept of self-organizing systems. The book discusses how these accounts of spontaneous emergent order shaped approaches to both the concrete governance and the abstract theorization of political and economic systems. In addition to her book manuscript, Hannah is working on three other projects: an examination of how biological metaphors shaped 20th century accounts of economic markets as evolutionary, growth-oriented entities, an analysis of how the concept of entropy influenced the emergence of the field of ecological economics, and a contemporary project that examines the philosophical implications of governing nature and the earth’s climate through artificial intelligence.
Research Interests: Early modern Britain; History of science; Environmental history; Global history; History of empire; Material culture and collections
Madeline White is a historian of science, environment, and empire. Her research explores the ties of early modern science to the British empire, and the capacity of natural science collections to enhance these histories. She is currently developing the project Growing Empire, which explores early British efforts to understand unknown environments through collection, cultivation, and classification. This project uses herbarium specimens, dried plant fragments now over four centuries old, to frame historical research, and will showcase how early modern botany was conducted in collaboration with the knowledge of people across races, genders, and geographies.
Prior to arriving at Northwestern, White served as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford, where she spearheaded the BLOOM project. This interdisciplinary project uses the Du Bois Herbarium as case study to demonstrates the potential of biological collections to ground historical research, develop digital approaches for collections-management in the natural sciences, and promote science-led education. White received her DPhil in 2024 in the History of Science and Medicine from the University of Oxford (Lincoln College), as well as an MPhil in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology (St Hugh's College, Oxford) and a BA in History and Physics (University of Southern California).