I teach renaissance and early modern History at the University of Toronto.  My research lies at the intersections of politics, gender, religion, and charity, and has explored how Renaissance cities handled orphans, abandoned children, criminals, and the poor in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.  One recent book, Cultures of Charity: Women, Politics, and the Reform of Poor Relief in Renaissance Italy (Harvard University Press, 2013) won prizes from the Renaissance Society of America and the American Historical Association. The most recent monograph, Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World:  An Alternative History of the Reformation (Cambridge University Press, 2015) asks how we might re-interpret the Reformation if we recognize it as the time in European history when the religious refugee emerges as a mass phenomenon. My current research into sensory conceptions of space in Renaissance Florence was the impetus for creating DECIMA as a digital tool mapping social, sensory, and built environments.

I am a newly-appointed Associate Professor, Teaching Stream, in Renaissance Studies and Digital Humanities. I taught at Ball State University from 2010, where I published on early modern Rome and Bologna, as well as on Florentine sex workers and teaching with the DECIMA Project. My other research includes work on the Offices of Ceremonies at the papal court, the College of Cardinals, and papal kin. I am also one of the editors of the Sixteenth Century Journal.

I am beginning my doctoral studies at the University of Toronto’s History department. My research interests center around broader histories of gender and sexuality, bodily history, sensory history, and the history of medicine and health. In my PhD, I plan to examine histories of reproductive and sexual health, with a particular interest in gynaecological practices in premodern Tuscany.

I am a MA student at the University of Toronto studying the Greek diaspora across the Mediterranean during the Early Modern period. I graduated from McGill University where I majored in History and Religious Studies and came to Toronto to delve deeper into my research interests. I am currently sorting through available census data from Livorno, helping to map and categorize the Greek population of the city. I look forward to working with the DECIMA project.

I completed my PhD in the Department of History at the University of Toronto in 2022. My research centered on early modern Genoese merchant networks in the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, in particular examining the intersections of slavery, banking, commerce and humanism. As part of the DECIMA team I have worked on transcribing entries from various census documents and developing a robust data model for the project. I was also involved in the development of a database of Genoese merchants from 1348 to 1528 as well as a portal for the digitized versions of the Rerum Italicarum Scriptores with the ITER gateway team.

I am a fourth-year undergraduate student at the University of Toronto, where I am pursuing an honors degree in History. My research interests lie in the socio-cultural history of early modern Italy, with a focus on the intersections of violence, gender, and interpersonal relations in seventeenth century Tuscany. I am currently writing my senior thesis, which examines how Florentine patrician women preserved their social networks in times of crisis.  I am honored to join the DECIMA team by transcribing the Florentine Registri Battesimali from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries.