Hannah Hartt is a PhD candidate specializing in modern European history, with particular interests in intellectual history and the history of religion. Her prospective dissertation will examine the emergence of comparative religion as a scholarly discipline in Western Europe, and especially France, during the nineteenth century. This project specifically asks how contemporaneous theories of the self and of consciousness influenced the work of comparative religion scholars and contributed to the epistemological construction of “religion” as an object of study. Hannah has additional interests in the philosophy of history, French imperialism, liberal Catholicism, and post-revolutionary politics in France.

Hannah received her B.A. in History from the University of California, Berkeley, where she also worked at Berkeley Law’s Human Rights Center as a researcher and project manager. Prior to arriving at Princeton, Hannah served as a program coordinator at the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion and the Program in Critical Theory.