Eva Vaillancourt is a historian working at the intersection of law, technology, science, and social life, with a special interest in policing. Her current project explores problems of normativity through the history of modern road traffic rules: red lights, stop signs, speed limits, pavement markings, pedestrian crosswalks, and all the other criminally enforceable instructions we obey (and disobey) every time we step into the street. Tentatively titled Red Light, Green Light: Traffic and the Twilight of Imperial Liberalism, 1870-1950, her book uses everyday traffic conflicts from across the British Empire to track changing rationalities of law and liberal governance in a time of technological disruption, political instability, and normative crisis.
After receiving her BA in History from Barnard College, Columbia University, Vaillancourt worked as an investigator of police misconduct in New York City. She received her PhD in History in August 2025 from the University of California, Berkeley, where she was a Berkeley-Mellon Fellow, and a fellow of the Townsend Center for the Humanities. She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Princeton Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities at Princeton University. Vaillancourt's work has been recognized by the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities, and generously supported by (among others) the Princeton University Humanities Council, the M.S. Chadha Center for Global India, the Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies, the Anglo-American Law and Policy Program at UC Berkeley, and the UC Berkeley Collaborative Sciences Center for Road Safety.
