Natasha Wheatley is an historian of modern European and international history, with a particular focus on legal and intellectual history, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the history of international law. Her current book project, The Temporal Life of States: Sovereignty, Legal Knowledge, and the Archive of Empire in Central Europe, charts a new history of sovereignty and state rights that draws the Habsburg Monarchy into the global frame of recent scholarship on empire and legal pluralism. It shows how the task of writing an imperial constitution generated a rich storehouse of legal concepts, methodologies, and arguments that outlived the empire to shape the interwar international order and the history of international law. Central Europe emerges as a foundational space for those interested in the broader twentieth-century history of the birth and death of states.

Wheatley is concurrently at work on a second project about questions of legal subjectivity, sovereignty, and personhood in international law between the two world wars. Earlier research on the League of Nations’ mandate system has appeared in Past and Present and elsewhere. A volume titled Power and Time, edited with Dan Edelstein and Stefanos Geroulanos, is forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press.

Wheatley received her Ph.D. with distinction from Columbia University in 2016. Before joining the Princeton faculty, she was an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow in the Laureate Research Program in International History at the University of Sydney. She has held fellowships in Vienna, Berlin, and Cambridge, and her research has been supported by (among others) the Doris G. Quinn Foundation, the Austrian Agency for International Cooperation in Education and Research, the Central European History Society, and the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Selected Articles

“Spectral Legal Personality in Interwar International Law: On New Ways of Not Being a State,” Law and History Review 35, no. 3 (2017).

“New Subjects in International Law and Order,” in Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History, ed. Patricia Clavin and Glenda Sluga (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 265–286.

“Mandatory Interpretation: Legal Hermeneutics and the New International Order in Arab and Jewish Petitions to the League of Nations,” Past and Present  227 (2015): 205–248.

“The Mandates System as a Style of Reasoning: International Jurisdiction and the Parceling of Imperial Sovereignty in Petitions from Palestine,” in The Routledge Handbook of the History of the Middle East Mandates, ed. Andrew Arsan and Cyrus Schayegh (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), 106–122.

“The Compass of International History: Eric Hobsbawm and After,” Journal of Modern European History 11, no. 4 (2013): 424–432.