Jennifer Wells is Assistant Professor of History & International Affairs at George Washington University. She received her PhD in history from Brown University and a JD with a specialization in international law from the University of California. Her work focuses on the intersection of history, law, politics, society, and the state. Wells’s current research projects focus on war crimes, humanitarian law, refugees, political violence, and the role of non-state actors and unbounded and ungoverned territories in the twenty-first century.
Wells has published on a wide range of issues that examine the intersection of history, law, politics, society, and the state, including: international war crimes; terrorism and U.S.-U.K. extradition law; refugee policy in the Middle East; conflict and climate change; British judges and Chinese pirates in 19th-century Hong Kong; local expertise in nation building; and the coercive powers of the state. Her first book, Prelude to Empire: State Building in the Early Modern British World, forces a fundamental reassessment of European empire by evaluating the shared links between early modern state formation and colonial expansion. Wells’s work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Humanities Center, Department of State, European Union, and Irish government, amongst others. She teaches a wide variety of classes on war crimes and genocide, international law, human rights, political violence, and British, Irish, and European history.
In addition to these academic pursuits, Wells is an on-air contributor for the BBC and National Geographic Channel. She sits on the board of Genocide Watch and the International Alliance to End Genocide and speaks about these issues to the diplomatic community in Washington, DC. She has worked for Amnesty International and clerked for the U.S. Federal Courts in the Northern District of California.