Contact
| Dept: | History |
| Email: | wschneid@iastate.edu |
| Office: | 603 Ross 527 Farm House Ln. Ames IA 50011-1054 |
| Phone: | 515-294-7266 |
Bio
Since joining the Iowa State History Department in 2006 to be with my family, I have taught in the areas of British history, Chinese history, legal history, and the history of the British Empire. In 2014, I received an LAS College Award for outstanding achievement in teaching. My current research interests lie in the history and cultural significance of purebred dogs in the United States and Britain. I’m also working on a long-standing project on UK extradition law and the relationship between Britain and post-colonial legal regimes left behind by empire.
I grew up in Michigan where my education was shaped profoundly by the academic strength and broad disciplinary competence of our public universities. Lured by the prospect of sunshine, however, I went to Stanford University where I received a B.A. in History and studied abroad in both Oxford, Britain and Taipei, Taiwan. In 1990, I was selected as a Truman Scholar. For graduate school, I traded in sunshine for a J.D./Ph.D. program at Yale University, although I did manage to work in both Honolulu and Hong Kong during summer vacations.
I received my J.D. from Yale in May 2001, where I coordinated the legal history speaker’s program, received funding as an Olin Fellow, was a senior editor of The Yale Journal and the Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, and received the Law & Social Inquiry graduate writing prize. After receiving my J.D., I served as a judicial clerk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.
During my history Ph.D. program at Yale, I concentrated on British history, British and American legal history, Chinese history, and history of the British Empire. I received funding from the Mellon Fellowship program, the Yale Center for British Art, and was awarded a Prize Teaching Fellowship, a Whiting Dissertation Fellowship, and the Hans Gatzke Prize for outstanding dissertation in European History in 2006. That dissertation was subsequently published by the Yale University Press in 2016 as Engines of Truth: Producing Veracity in the Victorian Courtroom.