Department of History

Allison Powers Useche

Position title: Assistant Professor of History

Email: auseche@wisc.edu

Phone: 608-890-3070

Address:
Office: 4120 Mosse Humanities Building
Mailbox: 4009 Mosse Humanities Building
Office Hours: Tuesday 1:00-3:00pm or by appointment

Allison Powers Useche headshot

Biography

I am a legal and political historian of the United States Empire and a social historian of international law. My research focuses on questions of political economy, legal claims-making, and critiques of state violence. I teach and advise broadly in histories of the North American West, US Foreign Relations, and international order.

My first book, Arbitrating Empire: United States Expansion and the Transformation of International Law (Oxford University Press, 2024) offers a new history of the emergence of the United States as a global power—one shaped as much by attempts to insulate the US government from international legal scrutiny as it was by efforts to project influence across the globe. Drawing on extensive archival research in the United States, Mexico, Panama, and the United Kingdom, the book traces how thousands of dispossessed residents of US-annexed territories petitioned international Claims Commissions between the 1870s and the 1930s to charge the United States with violating international legal protections for life and property. Through attention to the consequences of their unexpected claims, I demonstrate how colonized subjects, refugees from slavery, and migrant workers transformed a series of tribunals designed to establish the legality of US imperial interventions into sites through which to challenge the legitimacy of US colonial governance. One of the first social histories of international law, the book argues that contests over meanings of sovereignty and state responsibility that would reshape the mid-twentieth-century international order were waged not only at diplomatic conferences, but also in Arizona copper mines, Texas cotton fields, Samoan port cities, Cuban sugar plantations, and the locks and stops of the Panama Canal. Arbitrating Empire uncovers how ordinary people used international law to hold the United States accountable for state-sanctioned violence during the decades when the nation was first becoming a global empire—and demonstrates why State Department attempts to erase their claims transformed international law in ways that continue to shield the US government from liability to this day.

I have begun research for two new book projects. The first is a history of sovereign debt in the Americas from the Age of Revolutions to the creation of the Bretton Woods Institutions. The second is a colonial history of the discipline of comparative law in the United States.

I hold a B.A. in History from the University of California-Berkeley and a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University. Before joining the history department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I was a Clements Center Fellow for the Study of Southwestern America at Southern Methodist University, an assistant professor at Texas Tech University, and a Past & Present Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research in London.

Education

Ph.D., Columbia University
B.A., University of California-Berkeley

Books

Selected Publications

  • Arbitrating Empire: United States Expansion and the Transformation of International Law. Oxford University Press, 2024.
  • “The Specter of Compensation: Mexican Claims Against the United States, 1868-1938.” Beyond the Borders of the Law: Critical Legal Histories of the North American West. Ed. Pablo Mitchell and Katrina Jagondinsky. Kansas University Press, 2018.
  • “Gilt Trip,” review of Brahmin Capitalism: Frontiers of Wealth and Populism in America’s First Gilded Age, by Noam Maggor, Dissent Magazine (Fall 2017).
  • “Tragedy Made Flesh: Constitutional Lawlessness in Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 34:1 Special Issue on Insurgent Political Thought, Spring 2014.

Selected Awards

  • Clements Center for Southwest Studies Fellowship, Southern Methodist University 2019-2020
  • Award for Faculty Excellence in Research and Scholarship, Texas Tech University, 2019
  • Past and Present Postdoctoral Fellowship, Institute of Historical Research, University of London 2017-2018
  • Cromwell Dissertation Prize from the American Society for Legal History, 2017
  • Bancroft Dissertation Award in American History and Diplomacy, Columbia University, 2017
  • Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, 2016-2017
  • History in Action Project Award from Columbia History Department/AHA-Mellon, Summer 2016
  • International Travel Fellowship from Columbia’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Fall 2015
  • Littleton-Griswold Research Grant from the American Historical Association, 2015
  • Columbia Institute for Latin American Studies Summer Field Research Grant, 2015
  • Envirotech 2015 American Society for Environmental History Travel Grant, 2015
  • Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Samuel Flagg Bemis Research Grant, 2014

History Courses Taught