I am interested in learning more about the world of early modern Europe as it was understood by people in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In particular, my focus is on epistemology,  the history of the book and readers, and the development of history as a discipline. So far, I’ve taken courses on censorship and freedom of expression, history of the senses, and hermeneutics. Outside of early modern Europe, I’m interested in the conscious transmission of disciplinary values via historiography coursework, feminist and progressive pedagogies and literary history.

As an undergraduate at Oberlin College, my history major emphasized Jewish history and thought. I found my way to early modern Europe through a class on science and secularization, a seminar on Spinoza, and a term paper about the translations of the diary of Glikl von Hameln.

As a senior at Oberlin, I served an apprenticeship under Sam Wineburg, a professor of history education at Stanford School of Education who is a tireless advocate for history as a messy, contingent and ultimately revelatory process in the high school history curriculum.  An article we co-wrote  with Dan Porat and Susan Mosborg on the historical consciousness of American teenagers received the William Gilbert Award of the American Historical Association in 2007. I also spent one summer asking people who they thought was the “most famous American in history” with these results.

Matthew Jones and Pamela Smith are my advisors at Columbia. I am happy to answer any questions about the program.