I am a cultural and intellectual historian of early modern Europe, focusing mainly on England (but in order to make sense of this puzzling island I often venture off to Italy and the Low Countries). I joined the faculty of Tel-Aviv University in 2022 after completing my Ph.D. at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2020 (during which I also spent a few years as a visiting student researcher at UC Berkeley), and two more years as a postdoc fellow at the Polonsky Academy, the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. Most of my research involves questions about the history of cognition (and an attempt to understand what cognitive history actually means) and turns to book history in order to find answers. Book history also plays an important role in my classes, many of which I conduct at the library’s special collections department.
I am currently finalizing my first book project, The Grammar School: A Cognitive History, 1450-1700. This project historicizes the practice of learning Latin in Late Medieval and Early Modern English grammar schools in times in which paper, print, humanism, and the Reformation changed education from the level of the institution down to the level of the neuron. Based on extensive archival research in more than 30 special collection libraries across the UK, the US, and Continental Europe, this book explores schoolbooks (in both manuscript and print), architecture, the visual arts, drama, and a lot of schoolboys’ messy marginalia. Offshoots of this project have been published in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld institutes, and the Sixteenth Century Journal, and more are still in the pipeline. I am also further developing this project to explore the (cognitive) ramifications of grammar school education beyond the schoolroom – in the parish church, the Globe Theater, and the Royal Society (a fun read of the latter could be found in this blog post).
I am also at the beginning of a second and very exciting project that explores the history of popular numeracy in early modern Europe. I turn from words to numbers and from Latin to vernaculars (mainly English and Dutch) in order to understand how did merchants, shopkeepers, bookkeepers – and their wives and daughters – do things with numbers during a period often characterized as the rise of capitalism and the development of modern mathematics. I plan to traverse special collection libraries and map factors like numerals, calculation techniques, material culture, gender and social relations among people whose account books are often the only records they have left us. These issues also lie at the heart of a joint book project, co-authored with Dror Warhman, about one unique figure of a women engrossed in bookkeeping activities and the many copies this image had across eighteenth-century Europe. Some of my messy thoughts about this project can be found in this blog.
Over the years my research was generously supported by the Mellon Foundation, The Rare Book School, The Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Royal Society. My current work is carried out thanks to two significant research grants from the Israel Science Foundation and the Azrieli Foundation.
I am keen to discuss anything early modern with prospective and current research students, especially those debating whether they should devote their time in the university to exploring subjects such as early modern England, book history, the history of early modern education, the reception of the Classics, the history of scholarship in the Renaissance, the many lives of the arts of rhetoric, or the messy lives of merchants. Please feel free to contact me with any question!
