About

Foreground

I am a cultural and intellectual historian of Europe and the Mediterranean World, c. 1450-1900. Much of my work takes place at the intersections of the history of Biblical scholarship and the history of the book. I am particularly interested in learned encounters between Jews, Christians and Muslims and in the ways their textual traditions respond to each other as well as to technological innovation, from the invention of print to the invention of photography. At Cambridge I teach in the faculties of History (Early Modern Europe) and Divinity (Judaism). I supervise for colleges across the university and teach Historical Argument and Practice to undergraduate historians at St John's College, where I have been Research Associate since 2013. I am an Affiliated Lecturer of the Faculty of History, a member of the Cambridge Forum for Jewish Studies and of the Centre for Material Texts. In 2015-16, I convened the Comparative Seminar in Social and Cultural History, together with Mary Laven, Liesbeth Corens and Peter Burke.  While deeply engaged in European traditions and practices of scholarship, I have become increasingly interested in global and comparative approaches, and in 2017 I joined a research group at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan for a collaborative and comparative study of the material culture of the book from Japan to the Latin West.

Background

Born in Delft to an American mother and a Dutch father, I was raised in The Hague and educated at the Christelijk Gymnasium Sorghvliet and at the universities of Leiden and Chicago. I was a visiting graduate student at Princeton (2005-6) and Oxford (2008), and received my doctorate from the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought in 2012. My doctoral thesis was a study of the Antwerp Polyglot Bible (Christopher Plantin, 1568-1573), supervised by Glenn W. Most, David Nirenberg, James T. Robinson and Anthony Grafton.  Researching the thesis brought me to libraries and archives from Rome and Madrid to Leiden and Oxford, and I spent a year working in the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp, the only Renaissance printing shop that has survived in situ, with its library and archives intact (now a UNESCO World Heritage Site). In the Spring of 2012 I held the visiting chair in Jewish-Christian Relations at the University of Antwerp.
I first arrived in Cambridge in the Fall of 2012, to take up a postdoctoral research fellowship on the ERC-funded project "The Bible and Antiquity in 19th-century Culture", at CRASSH. With 5 senior directors and 8 post-docs across history, art history, classics, modern literature and theology, "Biblant" proved an invaluable apprenticeship in the kind of long and deep interdisciplinary collaborative work that CRASSH fosters.
Over the years, my work has received generous support from i.a. the Belgian-American Educational Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, the Scaliger Institute at Leiden, the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies in Philadelphia, the Institute for Jewish Studies at the University of Antwerp, and the European Research Council. As of June 2017, I am senior research associate and academic co-ordinator of the CRASSH project, "Religious Diversity and the Secular University", directed by Simon Goldhill and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.