Eva Vaillancourt is a historian working at the intersection of law, technology, science, and social life, with a special interest in policing. Trained in the history of modern Europe and European empires, she follows people in widely different contexts as they struggle to answer a basic question of human togetherness: how do we know what we should do? And what do we do when other people don’t behave as we think they should?
Vaillancourt’s current project explores the problem of normativity through the history of modern road traffic rules: red lights, stop signs, speed limits, pavement markings, pedestrian crosswalks, turn signals, 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 the British World Order, her book is based on government records and English-language publications from across the British Empire.
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 2025 from the University of California, Berkeley, where she was a Berkeley-Mellon Fellow, and a fellow of the Townsend Center for the Humanities. Her work has been recognized by the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities, and generously supported by (among others) 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.
Vaillancourt’s fellowship is supported by the Princeton University Humanities Council.
