I am a sixth-year Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University interested in the early modern world, working primarily on books and their readers, antiquarianism, the history of science, and the history of scholarship in the broadest sense.

My dissertation, Martin Crusius (1526-1607) and the Discovery of Ottoman Greece, is about understanding cultural and religious difference in the early modern world. My laboratory is sixteenth-century Tübingen, where a deeply pious Lutheran professor named Martin Crusius developed an extremely precise and highly informed representation of the Greek Orthodox Mediterranean. Through a well-preserved set of sources —hundreds of his books and manuscripts have survived— I follow Crusius’s long journey of discovery. Tracing the ways in which Crusius studied a culture that was not his own allows me to engage in debates about global Lutheranism, the history of ethnography, cross-cultural encounters, ways of establishing trust and credibility, the history of Orientalism, and the complex and variegated ways in which early modern scholars made knowledge.

At Princeton, I founded and I co-organized (with Stephanie Pope) the interdisciplinary lecture series for the Committee for the Study of Books and Media (CSBM). I am also part of an intergenerational team of scholars studying the Winthrop Family Library. My home away from home is the Stanley J. Seeger '52 Center for Hellenic Studies.

Before coming to Princeton, I studied Classics and History at the University of Amsterdam and spent a year hunting down manuscripts in Rome, Florence, and Venice. After completing my masters, I worked as a research and teaching assistant in the Department of Languages, Literature and Communication at Utrecht University. I also worked (and tweeted) for Annotated Books Online (ABO).