Peter Sahlins is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught courses on French and European history for thirty years (1989–2019). Trained at Harvard (1979) and Princeton (1986) as an historian of early modern Europe, he has published on a wide range of subjects, beginning with the history of the French-Spanish boundary and borderland (Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees, 1989); forest management and peasant rebellion (Forest Rites: The War of the Demoiselles in Nineteenth-Century France, 1994); seventeenth century immigration to France (Et si on faisait payer les étrangers? Louis XIV, les immigrés et quelques autres, 1999); nationality law and naturalization (Unnaturally French: Foreign Citizens in the Old Regime and After, 2004); animal-human relations at the court of Louis XIV (1668: The Year of the Animal in France, 2017); and most recently, the myth, rhetoric, and science of Neanderthals in the modern world (Neanderthals Among Us: The Making of a Prehistoric Human, forthcoming 2026).
At UC Berkeley, Sahlins served as founding director of the France-Berkeley Fund (1992–2002); founding director of the University of California in Paris (2002–2005); and director of Interdisciplinary and Area Studies (2013–2019). He is a founding board member of the global nonprofit Bibliothèques sans frontières / Libraries Without Borders, based in Paris and established in 2007, that facilitates access to books, information, and cultural resources in situations of humanitarian crises and structural neglect. A member of the Editorial Board of Prickly Paradigm Press, established in 2002, he took over as publisher, with Ramona Naddaff (UC Berkeley, Zone Books), in 2026. Sahlins splits his time between Paris, Berkeley, and Arcy-sur-Cure in Burgundy.