Stephen Lazer

Dr. Stephen Lazer has been a lecturer of History at Arizona State University since 2018. He earned his bachelor's degree in history from Wesleyan University in 2005 and his PhD from the University of Miami in 2014. Before working at ASU, Dr. Lazer served as a visiting instructor at Florida Gulf Coast University and as a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Nevada, Reno. 

Dr. Lazer's research focuses on early modern Alsace, in particular its transition from the Holy Roman Empire to France after 1648. His first book, State Formation in Early Modern Alsace, 1648-1789, is due out in 2019. The book investigates how the French monarchy transformed this fractured borderland into a province by negotiating sovereignty with Alsace’s many individual rulers. A close study of five territories ruled by one Alsatian dynasty--in particular the officials who worked for both political centers--shows the wide range of available power-sharing solutions.

His next project, tentatively titled Murder and Mayhem along the Rhine, will be a study of cross-border crime between Alsace and the city-state of Basel in the eighteenth century. The goal for this project is to continue the recent trend of problematizing borders by demonstrating that one's place in the early modern upper Rhine determined not just what borders were crossable, but also what borders actually existed.