Gili Kliger is a postdoctoral college fellow at Harvard University, where she teaches history and social theory. At the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (CES), Kliger co-chairs the Harvard Colloquium on Intellectual History.
She received her Ph.D. in history from Harvard in May of 2022. Her academic focus is the history of
Western empires from the early modern period to decolonization, with a particular focus on the
British, French, and U.S. empires in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her dissertation, entitled "Colonial Reformation: Religion, Empire, and the Origins of Modern Social Thought," explores the way key
figures in the history of the social sciences – Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, and Claude Lévi Strauss – drew on colonial, ethnographic material in formulating new ideas about the social world.
This information is accurate for the time period that the scholar is affiliated with CES.
