I am delighted to welcome Dr. Charles Petersen to the Silicon Valley Archives as the inaugural Harold C. Hohbach Historian.
Charles comes to Stanford from Cornell University, where he was a Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor in the History Department. He received his PhD in American Studies from Harvard University. His dissertation, “Meritocracy in America, 1885-2007,” received the Leo P. Ribuffo Dissertation Prize from the Society for U.S. Intellectual History and the Biennial Dissertation Prize from the Forum for the History of Human Science. Prior to his graduate work, Charles received a B.A. in English from Carleton College.
Charles has worked extensively in the Silicon Valley Archives (SVA) since 2017 when he was beginning the research that provided the foundation for his thesis. As he remarked in his application letter, his “scholarship is based on research in virtually every collection in the Silicon Valley Archives,” and I think he might be right about that. His history of meritocracy in the U.S. is based on intensive archival research and interviews, much of it focused on Silicon Valley. The book project that is currently in development from his dissertation has the working title Meritocracy in America: Reinventing the Frontier in Silicon Valley, 1891-2020, and promises to be an important interpretation of the rise of Silicon Valley as a moment in American history.
Besides his impressive academic credentials, Charles has been professionally and personally engaged in bringing history and the humanities to the public sphere. Since 2007, he has been an editor (now Senior Editor) at n+1, a wide-ranging literary, political, and cultural magazine, and he also served as the assistant to the editor of the New York Review. He has contributed to a variety of forums, both in voice and in print, from podcasts and radio broadcasts to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the San Francisco Chronicle, to name only a few. His Substack newsletter, “Making History” provides personal accounts of archival work and perspectives on the meanings of what historians find in the archives, bringing readers “into the archive to show how historians reconstruct the past, and rediscover the present.” Charles’s article for this newsletter, “How I Discovered Stanford's Jewish Quota: Stumbling my way through the admissions archives” led to the convening of a Stanford Task Force by former Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne; in 2022 this task force concluded that the Stanford Admissions Office had in fact limited the admission of Jewish students during the 1950-1970 period.
While Charles has spent much of his academic life east of the Mississippi, he originally hails from Idaho. Maybe because he has spent so much time visiting archives in this state, he has developed other California-based interests. He tells me that he is particularly excited about moving to California and continuing his exploration of Yosemite and the Eastern Sierra – or probably any of our other beautiful locations with large rocks to climb.
Charles begins work at Stanford on December 11th. He will occupy the Hohbach Historian’s office next to mine in the SVA Suite. Please stop by and say hello!