I am an Associate Professor of History and the Chair of the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies at UTSC. My interests include the history of cultural mediation, genealogies of Orientalism, and the relationship between translation and empire. My first book (Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice and Istanbul, Cornell University Press, 2011) explores how diplomatic interpreters, converts, and commercial brokers mediated and helped define political, linguistic, and religious boundaries between the Venetian and Ottoman empires in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I am currently finishing a second monograph (The Dragoman Renaissance: Diplomatic Interpreters and the Routes of Orientalism) and am embarking on a new project that explores trans-imperial archives and the circulatory regimes of diplomatic and linguistic knowledge in the early modern Mediterranean.
My contribution to the University Worlds project focuses on archives – the archives that the university administration holds as well as the “counter-archives” that critical studies of the university generate. I am also interested in the ways that digital scholarship methods may help us analyze and render more visible and legible multifaceted knowledge about university worlds as inhabited by faculty, students, staff, and others.