Research Interests

Intellectual history of early modern Europe; the Enlightenment; the Atlantic World; histories of science, religion, and the classical tradition.

Honors, Awards, and Fellowships

• Fall 2009:  Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
• July 2008:  Library Resident Research Fellow (Isaac Comly Martindale Fund), American Philosophical Society Library, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• Spring 2004:  Fellowship, Camargo Foundation, Cassis, France  
• Selma V. Forkosch Prize:  Best Article (2002), “Thinking Geometrically in Pierre-Daniel Huet’s Demonstratio evangelica (1670), Journal of the History of Ideas 
• Summer 2000:  Library Fellowship, Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, Germany 
• 1997-1999: September 1997-June 1999:  Mellon Fellow at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities, Lecturer in the History Department, Columbia University
• 1993/1994:  Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities
• 1992/1993:  Georges Lurcy Charitable and Education Trust Fellowship for study in France
• 1992:  Intensive Latin Study Program with Father Reginald Foster, Rome
• 1991:  Summer Seminar, “The Treatise of the Three Impostors,” Leiden, The Netherlands, organized by Richard Popkin

Exhibitions/Performances

• Research Curator, “New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Cultural Impact of an Encounter,” New York Public Library Exhibition, Fall 1992

Selected Publications

• Transforming the Republic of Letters: Pierre-Daniel Huet and European Intellectual Life, 1650-1720 (University of Rochester Press, 2007)
• “Of Sceptres and Censors: Biblical Interpretation and Censorship in Seventeenth-Century France,” French History, 20 (2006).
• “Cautious Curiosity: The Legacies of a Jesuit Scientific Education,” History of Universities, 19:2 (2004). 
• “Sea Tales: Nature and Liberty in an English Seaman’s Journal,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 33 (2004). 
• “Thinking Geometrically in Pierre-Daniel Huet’s Demonstratio evangelica (1679),” Journal of the History of Ideas (2002).
• “An Anonymous Critique of Pierre-Daniel Huet’s Demonstratio evangelica (1679),” LIAS: Sources and Documents Relating to the Early Modern History of Ideas 26:2 (1999).

Professional Presentations

   
• “Friendship in Erudition and Enlightenment” at the colloquium “L’amitié et les sciences. De Descartes à Lévi-Strauss,” 16-17 January 2009, sponsored by the École normale supérieure, CNRS, and Paris-Sorbonne III
   
• “Reading and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica,” noontime paper series, McNeil Center, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, April 2008
   
• “The slave in the garden: slave presences in natural history writings  on the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century,”  at Sciences et savoirs dans le monde atlantique francophone (XVIe-XVIIIe  siècles)  /  Knowledge and science in the francophone Atlantic world  (1500-1800) , Montréal, Québec (Canada), 26-28 April 2007 (also presented at the Association of Caribbean Historians, May 6-10, 2007, Jamaica)
   
• “Birds of a feather: Natural History and Male Sociability in 18th-Century Jamaica,” Seventh Symposium of the Social History Project, University of the West Indies, Jamaica, March 2006
   
• “The Frustrations of Father Le Pers, Jesuit Missionary, Naturalist, and Botanist in 18th-Century St. Domingue,” Western Society for French History, October 2004 
   
• Invited presentation of a chapter of Apollo’s Children (now Transforming the Republic of Letters), European Seminar, Johns Hopkins University, October 2004
   
• “From Erudition to Enlightenment: Defining Intellectual Culture in the 17th and 18th Centuries,” Annual Conference, The Historical Society, June 2004
   
• “Poetry & Patronage: Neo-Latin Verse & the Making of a Citizen of the 17th-century Republic of Letters,” Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting, March 2003
   
• “Secret Quarrel, Public Stakes: A Story of Censorship in 17th-Century France,” International Society for Intellectual History Annual Conference, Cambridge, England, July 2001
   
• “Juste malgré lui?: Pierre-Daniel Huet’s Origeniana (1668) and the Limits of Religious Polemics,” Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, March 1998.