I am a social, cultural and (budding) environmental historian at Monash University, drawing on a variety of European archives and covering the period 1100-1550. I was educated at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, The University of Wisconsin at Madison and Princeton University (PhD, 2006); taught at Bryn Mawr College, the University of Oxford and the University of Amsterdam; was awarded fellowships at Lincoln College, Oxford, Harvard University's Villa I Tatti and Stanford University's Humanities Center; and held brief visiting professorships at Monash University and Birkbeck College, University of London. My articles, monographs and edited volumes have appeared in English, Italian, Dutch, French, Russian, Chinese and Arabic, and contain work that has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, Hanadiv Foundation, the Netherlands Scientific Organization, the European Research Council and the Australian Research Council.
At present, I am developing two main strands of research. The first is a team project that builds on my interest in preventative healthcare in ‘premondern’ cities, and concerns environmental health in the preindustrial world. In this collaboration with colleagues working on Europe, the Middle East and India between 1100-1800, we trace prophylactic theories, policies and practices among urban dwellers, pilgrims, courts, miners and armies. We aim to show how, working within the shared medical and natural-philosophical paradigm of their era (Galenism), these im/mobile groups fought to prevent and reduce all sorts of pollution, injury and disease, as numerous documents and instruments of practice attest, alongside evidence and insights from the paleo-sciences.
My second project was inspired directly by getting to know one of these communities, namely Europe’s preindustrial miners, groups that often formed in the countryside. In addition to their preventative health practices, I have begun to reconstruct their settlement, social, cultural and environmental history in a series of articles leading towards a monograph. This strand, too, draws on a variety of written and material evidence and engages analytical frameworks across history, archaeology, social theory, digital humanities and the paleo-sciences.
In 2021 I also directed a team project inventorying premodern manuscripts in private and public hands across Victoria, Australia.
Other topics I have written about include the early history of prisons and the long-term history of corporal punishment; deviance among and violence against the mendicant orders; anti-corruption; and rural policing. You can explore these interests under the “research” and “publications” tabs.
I advocate the free exchange of ideas, based on curiosity, knowledge and insight, and seek to reduce to a minimum any obstacles that stand in its way. This means openly sharing research, on the one hand, and actively involving students in the process of learning and evaluation, on the other. Among others, I helped found ScholarlyHub and BodoArXiv and served on the editorial and advisory boards of openaccess.nl and the Open Library of Humanities.
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Former and current PhD Students
Claire Weeda (2012); Erik Goosman (2013); Valentina Covaci (2017); Frans Camphuijsen (2017); Marianne Ritsema van Eck (2017); Willem Flinterman (2017); Janna Coomans (2018); Sander Govaerts (2019); Josephine van den Bent (2020); Marianne Groep-Foncke (2021); Nathan van Kleij (2021); Arend-Elias Oostindiër (2022); Christian Manger (2023); Elizabeth Burrell (2024); Lola Digard (2024); Richard Tait (2024); Ester Zoomer; Matthew Topp; Rose Byfleet
Former and current Postdoctoral collaborators
André Vitória; Ronald Kroeze; Janna Coomans; Taylor Zaneri; Léa Hermenault; Alessandra Cianciosi; Shireen Hamza